Industrial application of knowledge-based engineering in commercial CAD/CAE systems

KBE systems have been studied by researchers for about 30 years. Numerous papers have been published, approaches have been formally built and methodologies have been developed. Despite these achievements, attempts at a wider and more effective application of KBE in industry still encounter various difficulties, both in the process of creating KBE applications and in conducting their further development. The reasons for this state of affairs are both the rapidly evolving IT reality of modern industry and the need for KBE methods, tools and solutions to keep up with it. Nowadays, many directions in KBE development and improvement as well as their industrial implementation are possible. The authors have examined a number of them, analysed and evaluated the obtained results, and proposed sets of guidelines that can both improve the quality of applied KBE solutions and make their development processes more efficient. The study includes references to various information streams present in industry, various structures of this information, and their impact on the developed solutions. The influence of external conditions was also taken into account. The work also presents real, industrial examples of generating, developing and applying UML templates in knowledge modelling for the needs of KBE applications. The applied templates are the result of a synthetic reflection based on standard programming constructions used by teams of programmers in specific industrial conditions. The created templates are the effect of considering the very individualized specifics of software development, as well as the individualized process of the evolution of a specific project area.