Competence management for the optimisation of product development processes

This paper presents a concept and a prototypical solution for the management of competences of engineers working in product development processes (PDP). Objectives are the representation of individual personnel competences, their utilisation for PDP planning activities such as the assignment of engineers to design tasks, and the support of human resources development. Main result is an instrument for the rational description of the expertise needed to process new orders and of the competencies of the engineering designers. The prototype implementation of the approach is based on a graph based structure and on rules representing competence requirements of PDP and human competence profiles, both processed by an interference mechanism.