A novel two-stage method for acquiring engineering-oriented empirical tacit knowledge

Engineering-oriented empirical tacit knowledge (ETK) is a kind of tacit knowledge originated from domain expert's experience combined with practice cases and scenarios. It is an important source of organisation knowledge. However, due to operational and technical obstacles, this kind of knowledge is not sufficiently harnessed and put into practical use. To deal with this problem, a novel two-stage acquisition method is proposed in this paper. The acquisition method consists of two phases, the stage from ETK in the mind of expert to ETK in initial state, and the stage from ETK in initial state to structured ETK. It constructs a complete tacit knowledge acquisition process from the domain expert's experience to the structured tacit knowledge. The objective is achieved by taking the following procedures: Firstly, present the concept of engineering-oriented ETK and a five-dimension representation model of ETK. Secondly, construct a two-stage ETK acquisition framework. Finally, describe an engineering decision case to validate the feasibility of the proposed approach. Satisfactory results are reached for the study.