On an adaptive product development system: a hybrid database approach

Getting the right information at the right time is one of the success factors of product development. However, there exist a great variety of data formats which make the bi‐directional data interchange among various development groups inefficient and costly. Due to the lack of adequate product and engineering data, design practitioners may find it difficult to transform the customer’s requirements to a value‐added product. This paper attempts to propose a hybrid database approach (HDA) to support effective data exchange among a case based reasoning knowledge repository and a corporate relational database model, presenting an integrated view of a company’s knowledge sources so as to enable better decision‐making by providing immediate access to key business information. To introduce machine learning capability to the whole system, case based reasoning (CBR) is embraced to capture past experience and knowledge for case matching in terms of product development issues. The significance of this research is the provision of a cross‐platform data exchange system, which is able to facilitate the creation of a conducive product development environment.