The meaning of manufacturing know-how

In the late 90th, the complex of concepts, theories, technologies and software called knowledge-based systems has become a key point in development of many future-oriented manufacturing paradigms, such as Agile Manufacturing and Intelligent Manufacturing Systems. Besides, the progress from craft production, to automated and flexible production and to wards'next generation' production is now realized to be in many respects determined by the human/systems ability to handle the domain knowledge rather than simply by a given standard of knowledge in the domain. This is the motivation for a continuously growing research interest to utilization of manufacturing knowledge. It should be noted however, that while a great many reports on different theoretical and applied aspects of knowle dge utilization have been published, the issues of the specificity of manufacturing knowledge and the appropriateness of the methodologies brought into manufacturing from other domains to build knowledge-based systems have not been given due attention. One instance of this research lack is given in this paper with the phenomenon of know-how. It was discovered rather long ago that know-how plays an important role during the solving of professional tasks in manufacturing (e.g.