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Design Automation has been in focus of research and application for several decades. This paper aims at establishing the current view of design automation and identification of potential for adoption based on a survey conducted in German speaking countries and a hypothesis based multivariate analysis based on networks. The findings show that design automation is still considered a means of automation of repetitive design tasks and potential for enhanced application exists. The necessity for methods supporting designers for identification and definition of design automation tasks is urged.

The re-use of product knowledge is vital to the development of Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) systems and to the deployment of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) strategies. This paper addresses the challenges related to KBE-PLM systems integration in order to unlock engineering knowledge from proprietary representations and to manage the lifecycle of KBE models as well as their usage by different design automation applications. Essential constituents of product knowledge are identified and analyzed and the concepts of design intent and design rationale are reintroduced as key enablers to re-use this product knowledge in the appropriate KBE context. The paper introduces a KBE-PLM integration framework including a platform-independent Open KBE repository structured according to the KBE-PLM integration schema. This schema is a multi-layer neutral product and knowledge data model designed for integrating information from parameterized Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models, rule-based KBE systems and PLM systems.

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