Sharing Manufacturing Information and Knowledge in Design Decision and Support

The integration of product design and manufacture has been pursued and advanced for over 20 years. Further advances continue to be pursued in the knowledge that success can lead to significant competitive advantage. This paper provides a contribution to the view that integration through information and knowledge sharing has the potential to offer designers and manufacturing engineers improved decision support based on the provision of high quality information. Our current research into both the definition of manufacturing information and knowledge models and knowledge sharing techniques is explained. Further, the potential for process specification languages to provide improved knowledge sharing is discussed.