Measures were taken to realize the structured knowledge and thinking of experts, personalized in the form of tacit knowledge, for the purpose of enhancing the development efficiency of design work.In this approach, the words are extracted from procedure manuals, checklists, and so on, that are usually put into written form and managed. Those words are categorized as design information and work procedures, after which they are structured using two types of machine languages. By further extracting both the knowledge and thinking that are the tacit knowledge of an expert directly from statements, the newness and quantity of the information were assured within a short time. At the same time, the thinking that experts perform based on their own empirical values was structured and incorporated in a model. In order to verify the effectiveness of that model in operation, a system for obtaining suggestions not from other people but from machines was constructed and applied to design work on actual crash safety performance. The results confirmed that, by comparison with conventional cases in which only procedure manuals are referred to, cases in which the present model was used to perform work showed that it became possible to advance the work efficiently so that goals could be achieved in approximately one-half the time.
Article of Honda R&D Technical Review Vol.32 No.2 (91 - 98)