A field-based knowledge graph assisted conceptual design for structure configuration of engineering equipment

In the era of digital transformation, engineering design presents new development prospects. The key to conceptual design of engineering equipment lies in optimising structure configuration and effectively utilising knowledge support. Existing research focuses on the guidance of design methods to design activities and the auxiliary reasoning of knowledge systems, but ignores the close connection between knowledge systems and design activities. How to establish a coupling mechanism between knowledge systems and design activities to improve the accuracy of knowledge reasoning for structure configuration is the current challenge. Knowledge Graph (KG) has the advantages of structured organisation of heterogeneous knowledge and efficient knowledge retrieval. A framework for using field-based knowledge graph-assisted conceptual design (Field-KGCD) to support structure configuration of engineering equipment is proposed. Triples of structural entities and their interaction relationship are extracted from patent documents by event extraction technology. Energy sources related to structure interactions are used to establish the association relationships between different structure entities. Knowledge retrieval and recommendation strategy based on graph algorithm is proposed to achieve accurate knowledge assistance in the design process. A case study on the conceptual design of engineering drilling equipment demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach.