Design Automation System-Supporting Documentation and Management

Abstract: During the practical use of Design Automation (DA) System in a company, the lack of assistance from either documentation work about the whole system or management of knowledge could bring out some obstacles when engineers reuse existing knowledge and information. The purpose of this project is to explore an approach of documentation and knowledge management in DA System. The study is mainly based on the actual case of seat heater DA system developed by JTH. Based on preset functional requirement for the potential solution, several principles and methods of documentation and knowledge management are introduced such as MOKA, CommonKADS, SysML and PVM. A number of useful applications such as DRed (Design Rationale Editor), PC PACK, Sementic MediaWiki and Product Model Manager became candidates solutions for this project. The selection of final approach was Sementic MediaWiki, and this is based on the comparison of the result from evaluation of functionality of each application. Due to specificity of documentation on the DA system, the “process based” approa­ch­ had been used for structuring system included knowledge instead of using a systematical method like either MOKA or CommonKADS completely. Setting up interconnection between different knowledge objects was one of the most important tasks in this project because it enables capturing and retrieving of knowledge. Sementic MediaWiki, a powerful text representative and web-based tool has been used as a platform of representing the whole knowledge and information. With its implementation, the performance of Sementic MediaWiki had been tested accor­ding to the preset functional requirement. After a slight refine process to the solution, the satisfactory result had been achieved, and also proved the applicability of Sementic Wiki in such kind of project.