Embedded knowledge service in mechanical product development

To develop competitive mechanical products, the enterprises should ask for external knowledge service. The concept of embedded knowledge service is presented to embed the independent technical activities of external resources unites as a part of the complete product development process of design entities. The mechanism of embedded knowledge service method is analyzed. Several key problems such as the decomposition of design tasks for cross-organizational assignment, the search of partners, the evaluation of the resources units, and the information transfer from the design entities to the resources units are analyzed point by point to make the embedded knowledge service easy to be applied. Finally, the effectiveness of the embedded knowledge service is illustrated with a case study on the development of an internal combustion engine.