Towards Human Controlled Intelligent Product Engineering Systems

- Requirements against work of engineers have changed. Customers demand well-engineered products in high number of variants with short innovation cycles. Product engineering has been extended to market related activities and recycling. The result of this development is a powerful information technology for engineering in the form of model based lifecycle management of product information. In these environments, high amount of information for heterogeneous engineering objects needs high number of coordinated decisions. In order to establish appropriate solution for the above task, more intelligent features of modeling systems are needed than in current engineering systems. The authors analyzed the current status of application of knowledge based methods in product modeling and proposed a modeling method where human intent driven objectives and contextual connections are represented for the application of models. Intent modeling and human dialogue are necessary because intelligent engineering processes must be under continuous and strict control by authorized and responsible humans.