Towards Experience-Based Smart Product Design for Industry 4.0

This paper presents the concept of smart virtual product development (SVPD) system capable of supporting industrial product development process. It enhances the decision making process during different stages and activities involved in product development i.e. product design, manufacturing, and its inspection planning. The enhancement is achieved by using the explicit knowledge of formal past decision events, which are captured, stored, and recalled in the form of set of experiences. The basic description and principle of the approach are introduced first, and then the porotype version of the system is developed and tested. Working of the design knowledge management module of the system is demonstrated with the case study, which verifies the feasibility of the proposed approach. The presented system successfully supports smart product design and it can play a vital role in Industry 4.0 development.