3. Knowledge Management

Multi-material-design is a promising approach for the automotive industry to operate economical lightweight design. Combining metallic materials with composites and short-fibre reinforced plastics enables to develop lightweight components with superior mechanical properties. One of the central challenges is that most car body developers in the automotive industry have gathered little experience with plastics, composites and multi-material designs. One approach of product development to meet this challenge is the provision of knowledge, for example through design rules and design principles. The scope of this chapter is to provide knowledge for developing multi-material designs. First, relevant knowledge is identified, and an access concept for the design rules is developed. Furthermore, what will be developed is a text similarity algorithm for identifying similar rules. Afterwards, the knowledge management system will be prototypically implemented and applied to two case studies.