Knowledge acquisition and documentation for the development of a KBE system for automated FE analysis

Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) is now being used in the area of Finite Element Analysis (FEA). To undertake any KBE initiative requires a large amount of information. This paper describes the process undertaken to acquire the knowledge for an automated analysis system. This has highlighted that a time consuming part of creating such a system was the knowledge acquisition and documentation process as it was undertaken by a knowledge engineer who did not have understanding of the problem domain. The creation of the system would have been enhanced if the researchers creating it had also undertaken the knowledge acquisition process.