Knowledge reuse and collaborative environments in industrial engineering

In recent years, thanks to the ICT systems, there has been a continued growth and an increasing accumulation of the available information. Managing information has become one of the key activities in any sector. Indeed, information management emerged as the core and the basis of manufacturing enterprise. The research activity mainly focused on the development of a Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) methodology for supporting a manufacturing company, in particular railway manufacturers, in reusing company knowledge. A Decision Support System (DSS) has been developed with the scope of identifying products already designed that fully or partly fit what required by new bids. The DSS has been built within a PLM software and part of the research has concentrated on comparing the PLM suites available in the market searching for the best tool able to act the role of a centralized management dashboard for knowledge reuse. The proposed methodology involves different business units and several expertise, emphasizing the importance of a collaborative environment and the need of a methodology for design review sessions. Contents of this thesis retrace these considerations: the second chapter reports a technology scouting on the available PLM tools; the third and the fourth chapters deal with a KBE methodology and the development of a DSS; the fifth one proposes the development of an immersive virtual reality environment aimed at deploying review sessions by design and manufacturing teams with interdisciplinary skills; at last, in the sixth chapter, it is reported a Discrete Event Simulation application as example of a procedural KBE application.