Generation of Design Knowledge from Product Life Cycle Data

This paper addresses the problem of generating design knowledge from product field data. The main motivation to consider this issue is the fact that in many companies there is quite a substantial history of collection and analysis of products field data which can be exploited in the generation of valuable knowledge to aid designers in improving specific aspects of their (re)design activities for products of the same family. Currently, field data is mainly used for managerial, marketing or logistical purposes. A product oriented framework with an appropriate analysis of this data and a deliberate focus on issues related to design aspects such as reliability, maintainability, environment and safety can enable the generation of useful knowledge which can aid designers in improving the considered aspects of their (re)design activities. In this paper, we present a general approach for generating design knowledge from product field data and we illustrate the main steps of this approach for the case of generating reliability knowledge from maintenance field data.