Developing customized products is the business case for many manufacturing companies striving to fulfill the customers' specific needs. When manufacturing customized products it is often necessary to also develop corresponding customized manufacturing tooling. There is a need to support concurrent development of new product variants along with their manufacturing toolsets. The communication between design engineers and manufacturing engineers is hence a key issue that if solved would enable design engineers to forsee how changes in product design affect tooling design and vice versa. To understand the correlation between the design of a product and its corresponding manufacturing tools, access to design rationale of the product and the developed tooling is required. Design rationale provides an explanation of why an artifact is designed in the way it is, including statements (textual, numerical or geometrical), argumentations, and decisions. Since design rationale is composed of information scattered all across the company's repositories in different formats (e.g. in type of a geometry, picture, table, and textual document), representing the design rationale is a challenge for many enterprises. In this paper a method is introduced that enables capture, structure, and access to design rationale across product design and tooling design. The system enables representing design rationale in formats such as CAD models, spreadsheets, textual formats, and web pages. The method has been examined by developing a prototype system tested in a case company which develops and manufactures customized car accessories, such as roof racks and bike carriers, for different car models. The company develops and manufactures the products as well as the required tooling equipment. The prototype system includes different software commonly used by engineers during designing a product, for the purpose of making it applicable for other companies.

Design automation systems are implemented by many manufacturing companies to automate the repetitive and time-consuming design tasks. By automating such tasks, the designers have more time to focus on creativity and offer more customized solutions to the customers. To automate a design task, first, the design knowledge should be captured from designers. This type of knowledge which is usually understandable by humans should be structured and formalized. Next, computer codes and scripts (that are mostly understandable by computers/expert persons) are created to execute the knowledge and provide the desired output. To support maintenance of computer codes and scripts in a design automation system, it is necessary to know what, how and why about that piece of code/script. In order to support maintenance of the systems, we represent the system’s knowledge in form of knowledge objects. Knowledge objects are executed in run time and consist of two parts: computer readable and human readable. The focus in this paper is on the human readable which we call it “design description”. A MOKA-based framework is provided to create design descriptions for the computer readable parts. The design descriptions help engineers to understand and if needed update the computer readable parts, which in a wider aspect support maintenance of the whole system. E-books were used as a way to represent the design descriptions and a case study is provided to explore the results of the research.

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Implementing design automation systems to automate repetitive and time consuming design tasks enables engineer-to-order manufacturers to perform custom engineering in minimum time. To maintain a design automation system, regular updating of design information and knowledge is necessary. Consequently, there is a need of principles and methods to support capturing and structuring associated knowledge, specially, design rationale. In this paper a method for capturing, structuring, and accessing to design rationale in order to support maintenance of design automation systems is presented. The method is tested through a design automation system that develops FEA (finite element analysis) models automatically. The results are evaluated in a case company which is a supplier to the automotive industry serving many brands and car models which each more or less requires a unique solution.