Functional knowledge integration of the design process

Functional knowledge integration is the initial and core phase of a design process. It is the key phase to ensure that the functional requirement of the design product can be appropriately complied with, and its result is also the rudiment of the subsequent detailed design work. If this important phase can be supported by an increasingly distributed resource environment, and be automated such that its completion requires less manual work, the efficiency of the design process would be largely improved and its ability to promote innovation would be enhanced. Therefore, this study involved a detailed analysis of the functional knowledge integration of the design process, as well as the proposal of a corresponding running model. Based on the model, a computational algorithm and an evaluating method were established to automate functional knowledge integration. A corresponding computer program was developed to prove the feasibility of this approach, and it was used to design a solarpowered wiper blade.