Article Review: Using Design History Systems for Technology Transfer
in place December 6, 2000, last modified December 14, 2000

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1. Introduction

• There is a strong need for an electronic alternative to engineering notebooks.
• The possiblity has started to exist for a record of design decisions to be kept using a computer.
• Design History is the result of "the explicit recording of design information in the form of design problems, alternative solutions and the evaluations or arguments leading to the choice of a particular alternative" [Freeman, 1975, p.544].

2. Technology Transfer

• Technology Transfer is an activity involving recording the results of the decision-making (design) of the source group about some manufacturing processes, and transfering those results to another group, the target group, in such a form that they can easily use and modify the information.
• The ingredients of Technology Transfer:
  1. Decision Making
  2. Recording
  3. Transfer
  4. Use
  5. Modification

3. The Technology Transfer Problem

• - Manufacturers hava a limited time frame to introduce new products otherwise they lose market share. The success of new product startup depends on the technology transfer process between Advanced Development and Manufacturing. The transfer time impacts manufacturing ramp-up time and the time to market.
  - The information (experimaents, reports, process sheets, trouble shooting knowledge, decisions, rationale, and motivations) is stored in private repositiories like engineering notebooks. It is scattered, fragmented, and unorganized.
• Key Issues: (* selectivly listed by reviewer)
  1. Appropriate Knowledge Structure
  2. Hypertext
  3. Levels of Abstraction
  4. Design Histories
  5. Reports

4. Design Histories

Reference review of design histories in engineering design, software design, and protocol design.

5. The Solution - The PTTT System

• The Architecture of the PTTT System
  • It captures the process flow as a hierarchical graph.
  • The higher levels represent an abstraction of the more detailed process steps at the lower level.
  • It organizes information by chunking (associating and relating) docuements.
  • A document can be an experiment, a report, a justification, a decision, a note, a technical paper, a process sheet, or trouble-shooting knowledge.
  • Documents are stored as "Compound Documents", allowing a combination of text, graphs, and images.
  • Each node in the process flow graph is associated with chunked information (the documents relevant to that process step).
  • Keyword searching
  • PTTT keeps a history of all documents with version stamped and justification.
• System Integration
  Integration with Knowledgebase, Compound document editor, Mail, Code Management System, and Image editor.

6. Summary and Conclusion

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Knowledge & Engineering Databases (c) copyright Namchul Do, 2000