Knowledge management for product innovation design based on dual-layer concept network

Creative design has become the core of competitiveness for enterprises, and the design process is an activity based on multi-domain knowledge. Designers need to have a lot of interdisciplinary knowledge in this activity, and there may be a burden on understanding. To alleviate understanding burden and promote knowledge integration, a dual-layer concept network is established based on complex networks. Knowledge association in the network originates from the perspective of innovation and product design, facilitating in providing designers with creative and content-related knowledge. This paper takes function, invention principle and scientific principle as the label to build a creative attribute network, and uses the semantic similarity between knowledge texts to build a semantic association network. Combining creative attributes and content semantics of knowledge, a novel knowledge management and browsing method based on a dual-layer concept network is proposed. Meanwhile, due to the ambiguity and uncertainty of design activity and knowledge demand, designers repeatedly query knowledge based on a dual-layer concept network. During this process, designers’ think of diverges and associates, which inspire them to integrate knowledge and generate creative ideas. Finally, this paper takes the problem of vibrating screens as an example to verify the practicability and effectiveness of this method. The methodology is expected to be served as an essential supporting tool for sparking innovation.