A study on engineering history base

During engineering processes, many kinds and amounts of information are use d and produced. Such information is useful in successive cases, and thus it s reuse is desired, In this paper, information on attributes of the product s is referred to as 'product information', and information on the reasons f or and/or history of a designer's thought process is,referred to as 'proces s information'. According to this classification, process information can b e used for obtaining an explanation of product information. The purpose of this work is to build a database, called an 'engineering history base', fro m which engineers cart retrieve explanations to enable the reuse of product information. in this paper, explanation from the 'process' viewpoint is th ought to be important in promoting the reuse of product information. There are two types of explanation for the process: teleological and causal. Howe ver, until now, little attention has been paid to the causal explanation fo r the process. Thus, in this paper, an information model which focuses on b oth types of explanation is proposed. The model is adopted for the engineer ing history base and a prototype system is developed. The appropriateness o f this model is discussed by analyzing the actual delta in the development of a color video printer.