Supporting design knowledge exchange by converting models of functional decomposition

The concept of technical function is used with different meanings in the engineering domain. This ambiguity hampers the exchange of design knowledge across functional modelling approaches. This paper investigates three issues relevant to handling this communication problem. First, it provides a clarification of engineering meanings of function and functional decomposition (fd) models. Secondly, it presents an assessment of the benefits of co-existing functional conceptualisations. Thirdly, following the positive outcome of this assessment, it presents a conceptual strategy to exchange design knowledge across modelling approaches. This strategy does so by converting models of fd across approaches. It is shown that the proposed conversion strategy is able to retain design knowledge that is lost when using another methodology for the conversion of fds. This paper ends by identifying a future research agenda for model conversions.