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To proactively assist engineers in finding and reusing massive design lesson-learned knowledge (DLK), knowledge recommendation has become a key technology of knowledge management. However, in collaborative product design, complex multitask context information disrupts the perception of engineers' knowledge needs for every single task. In this situation, traditional knowledge recommendation approach is prone to provide a mixed DLK recommendation list, thus resulting in a lack of pertinence and low accuracy. Facing these challenges, scarcely any reports on context-aware knowledge recommendation in the multitask environment of collaborative product design. Aiming to fill this gap, a multitask context-aware DLK recommendation approach is proposed to assist collaborative product design in a smarter manner. The mutual interference of context information from different tasks is addressed by preprocessing works, multitask knowledge need awareness, DLK recommendation engine, respectively. Therefore, the proposed approach not only effectively acquires engineers' knowledge needs from different task contexts and pertinently provides the corresponding DLK recommendation list for each task but also guarantees the accuracy of DLK recommendation in multitask context of collaborative product design. To validate the proposed approach, a DLK recommendation system is implemented in a shipbuilding scenario, and some comparative experiments are carried out. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms conventional approaches in the aspects of effectiveness and performance. Therefore, it opens up a promising way to help engineers reuse needed DLK in collaborative product design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A well-defined and flexible design chain reference model forms the basis for promoting collaborative design chain. The Special Interest Group under the Design Chain Council proposed the design chain operations reference (DCOR) in an attempt to assist enterprises building a design chain modeling frameworks. To date, DCOR version 1.0 only provides preliminary definitions, such as those for major design procedures, and lacks an example of best practices in the industry. Additionally, few studies have attempted this research issue. This study integrates the concepts of design chain, collaborative product design, and collaborative product commerce in a proposed collaborative design chain operations reference model (CDCORM) based on DCOR as a reference for developing a collaborative design chain system in the product lifecycle. The CDCORM consists of four hierarchical levels: collaborative design chain business model; collaborative design chain cooperative model; collaborative design-chain process model; and, a collaborative design chain operational model. Based on project management, the CDCORM has five core procedures-product plan, concept design, detail design, design review, and design amend. This study also assesses the effectiveness of the CDCORM by applying it to the motorcycle industry. In summary, this study extends the DCOR model and proposes a complete collaborative design chain reference model and implements a system in the motorcycle industry as a case study. This case study serves as a best practices example for the motorcycle industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]