The design of complex engineered systems highly relies on a laborious zigzagging between computer-aided design (CAD) software and design rules prescribed by design manuals. Despite the emergence of knowledge management techniques (ontology, expert system, text mining, etc.), companies continue to store design rules in large and unstructured documents. To facilitate the integration of design rules and CAD software, we propose a knowledge graph that structures a large set of design rules in a computable format. The knowledge graph organises entities of design rules (nodes), relationships among design rules (edges), as well as contextual information. The categorisation of entities and relationships in four sub-contexts: semantic, social, engineering, and IT – facilitates the development of the data model, especially the definition of the “design context” concept. The knowledge graph paves the way to a context-aware cognitive design assistant. Indeed, connected to or embedded in a CAD software, a context-aware cognitive design assistant will capture the design context in near real time and run reasoning operations on the knowledge graph to extend traditional CAD capabilities, such as the recommendation of design rules, the verification of design solutions, or the automation of design routines. Our validation experiment shows that the current version of the context-aware cognitive design assistant is more efficient than the traditional document-based design. On average, participants using an unstructured design rules document have a precision of 0.36 whereas participants using our demonstrator obtain a 0.61 precision score. Finally, designers supported by the design assistant spend more time designing than searching for applicable design rules compared to the traditional design approach.

复杂工程系统的设计高度依赖于计算机辅助设计（CAD）软件与设计手册规定的设计规则之间的费力曲折。尽管出现了知识管理技术（本体论，专家系统，文本挖掘等），但是公司仍继续将设计规则存储在大型非结构化文档中。为了促进设计规则和CAD软件的集成，我们提出了一个知识图，该知识图以可计算的格式构造了大量设计规则。知识图组织设计规则（节点）的实体，设计规则（边）之间的关系以及上下文信息。在四个子上下文中对实体和关系进行分类：语义，社会，工程和IT –促进了数据模型的开发，特别是“设计上下文”概念的定义。知识图为通向情境感知的认知设计助手铺平了道路。实际上，连接到或嵌入到CAD软件中的上下文感知认知设计助手将几乎实时捕获设计上下文，并在知识图上运行推理操作以扩展传统的CAD功能，例如设计规则，设计解决方案的验证或设计例程的自动化。我们的验证实验表明，当前版本的上下文感知认知设计助手比传统的基于文档的设计更有效。平均而言，使用非结构化设计规则文档的参与者的精度为0.36，而使用我们的演示器的参与者的精度得分为0.61。最后，