Cutting Tool Design Knowledge Capture & Reuse

Abstract

Cutting tools play an important part in today's manufacturing industry. There is an ever-increasing pressure on the cutting tool design industry to produce better quality products in response to the needs of the automotive and aerospace industries. Add to this the increasing complexity of the machined product requiring the use of non-standard cutting tools. The consideration of this area of cutting tool design is in recognition of the importance of the information and knowledge requirements at the beginning and during the design process. It has been noticed that in the cutting tool industry that the knowledge provision lacks structure and organisation. Understanding the knowledge requirements of the designers would provide substantial benefits to the design process. Thus, this research explores the role and extent of special purpose cutting tool design knowledge. Literature review shows there is a lack of research examining the knowledge of designers within special purpose cutting tool design. The design of a special purpose-cutting tool is a knowledge intensive task. This thesis presents a novel methodology for Knowledge Elicitation called Knowledge = Expert - Novice (KEN). KEN is a methodology requiring active participation in the design task. It is demonstrated that KEN is suitable for the capture of cutting tool design knowledge. KEN is used to examine the nature and extent of special purpose cutting tool design. It is observed that KEN provides a structured approach to the Knowledge Elicitation from an expert. An in-depth investigation of the preliminary design stage has revealed the knowledge required by special purpose cutting tool designers. This thesis presents an ontology-based framework for cutting tool design knowledge representation following a functional, structural and behavioural methodology. The knowledge is represented by base-functions, ways of achievement and design considerations organised into functional hierarchies. The ontology is validated by domain experts rating the terms within the ontology and by cases. It is observed that the ontology is a complete representation of the cutting tool design knowledge. A viewpoint of design reuse is modelled to include a set of descriptor terms and captured domain knowledge. The viewpoint is mapped onto the ontology to provide a set of generic terms. The reuse viewpoint is then implemented onto Case-Based Reasoning software to search for past designs. The reuse viewpoint is then validated using a number of case studies and user trials. It is demonstrated that the reuse viewpoint is effective for the extraction of terms from design documentation, searching for and recalling past designs.