抄録
Manufacturing industries in Japan have been faced with the problem of lost knowledge. Knowledge possessed by production engineers and workers and workers is usually hard to extract by the traditional method of artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering, since it is deeply related to the complicated conditions of the physical world. The authors' research group has developed a method for knowledge acquisition, storage, and utilization by using the technology of virtual manufacturing. The method, named Active Knowledge Archive (AKA), introduces the connections between the descriptions of knowledge applications and the digital models. For knowledge acquisition, a conrete situation of problem solving generated by virtual tools is presented to a knowledge holder. It is easier for the knowledge holder to remind and use his knowledge in the concrete situation. Each extracted information is associated to the virtual model for preserving the context of knowledge application and it can be retrieved with the similar conditions of other virtual models.
