It is important to gain a fundamental understanding of how design knowledge is used in the aerospace industry and what knowledge needs to be captured to support future design. The relevant knowledge has to be captured and represented for storage in a knowledge-based system. The nature of this knowledge is currently being investigated by observing the differences between novice and experienced designers. When designing complex engineering systems it is important to identify, capture and distribute the requirements correctly. Customer requirements, available resources and internal criteria give rise to constraints on the design.
Requirements cascade down the product and process structures.
Evaluation criteria are generated internally at every level in the product breakdown and may apply at any level. The design is complete and successful when all the requirements and constraints are satisfied according to the relevant criteria. It is important to understand fully design intent within the context of project, technical, legal and safety requirements. Methods for capturing and propagating design intent during and after a project are needed. There is the need to represent and access the knowledge to be stored in future databases, as well as the need to access knowledge stored in existing databases.