Abstract
A lot of design troubles occur chronically.Most of the troubles should have been prevented if the characteristics and attributes of the components in the product and functional and physical relationships among the components were realized and the causal chains of failures that would occur in the components were exhaustively analyzed. It is indispensable to acquire reusable design knowledge on failures from the actual troubles in order to perform the predictive analysis of the causal chains of failures effectively. In this paper, we propose the well-organized knowledge structure of a causal chain of failures. We discuss the following points necessary for constructing the knowledge structure.
(1) The problems with knowledge on failure chains and what is necessary for the knowledge
(2) The fundamental model of a causal chain for constructing the proper knowledge structure
(3) Elaborated stress-strength model for realizing the causal mechanism module.
(4) The way to connect the relevant failure mechanisms
(5) The type of the cause-and-effect relationships in a casual chain.
We also have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposal through constructing the actual knowledge base of design troubles that have occurred in copiers.
