A novel two-stage method for acquiring engineering-oriented empirical tacit knowledge

Abstract

Engineering-oriented empirical tacit knowledge (ETK) is a kind of tacit knowledge originated from domain expert's experience combined with practice cases and scenarios. It is an important source of organisation knowledge. However, due to operational and technical obstacles, this kind of knowledge is not sufficiently harnessed and put into practical use. To deal with this problem, a novel two-stage acquisition method is proposed in this paper. The acquisition method consists of two phases, the stage from ETK in the mind of expert to ETK in initial state, and the stage from ETK in initial state to structured ETK. It constructs a complete tacit knowledge acquisition process from the domain expert's experience to the structured tacit knowledge. The objective is achieved by taking the following procedures: Firstly, present the concept of engineering-oriented ETK and a five-dimension representation model of ETK. Secondly, construct a two-stage ETK acquisition framework. Finally, describe an engineering decision case to validate the feasibility of the proposed approach. Satisfactory results are reached for the study.

A Novel Method for Acquiring Engineering-Oriented Operational Empirical Knowledge

“…Tacit knowledge acquisition means eliciting tacit knowledge from various knowledge sources and representing it in the right form in order to share the knowledge among organizational members and reuse it [20,21]. Up till now, many tacit knowledge extraction methods have been developed and applied in the fields of software engineering, manufacturing engineering, and health care [22,23]. Many of these methods are based on literal documents.…”

“…The main body of OEK representation is OEK content incorporating the motion combination and motion sequence obtained from a skilled technician. Besides this, since OEK is related with the specific operation process and problem scenarios, it is indispensable to integrate the scenarios into OEK representation [22,23]. The operator's intent assumes a driving role of the motions, so it should be considered in the representation of OEK.…”