IMMORTAL INFORMATION AND THROUGH-LIFE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ( IITKM): STRATEGIES AND TOOLS FOR THE EMERGING PRODUCT-SERVIC

Engineering companies across a range of sectors, including defence, civil aerospace and construction, are moving from simply supplying products to owning, supporting and maintaining them on behalf of users, often over long timescales. This new "product-service" approach requires business, operational and information-system models that extend thirty years or more into future.

This project is concerned with identifying such models. The project comprises three key areas of research. The first focuses on the creation of novel and extended representations of products that will integrate methods for handling product information, design-process information and design rationale.

The second research area is concerned with learning from the product in use. The product life-cycle is itself part of a cycle of development of the information describing the product, the commercial, manufacturing and operational systems in which it is embedded, and of the knowledge embedded in the communities that develop, support and use these systems. The dynamics of this triumvirate of information, knowledge and systems are being studied.

The third research area is concerned with creating organisational systems to manage the overall knowledge system life-cycle and the people-centric procedures within them. It investigates the dynamics of knowledge use throughout the life-cycle of complex product-service systems.