Abstract

Hongwei is a second year PhD research student in the Knowledge Management Group within the EDC .

Abstract: Design rationale records the issues addressed, the options considered, and the reasons for making the specific decisions, during a design process. Design rationale capture tools, i.e. the DRed of the EDC , are gaining increasing acceptance in industry. A large amount of design rationale records are, therefore, generated during the routine design tasks. However, it is usually frustrating for designers to find a piece of rationale from a huge amount of entries, which makes the computer-aided retrieval a necessity. Current retrieval methods focus mainly on either the classification of rationale or the key-word based search of records. The pitfalls of these methods are obvious. First, a classification scheme imposes a large burden on experts. Second, key-word based search requires the designers to understand, at least to some extent, what they are seeking for. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop an efficient retrieval strategy for design rationale records captured using DRed, and to implement it as an add-on to DRed. In this talk, the up-to-date progress of this project will be introduced. Specifically, the preliminary results will be presented and future work will be discussed.