Abstract: The acquisition and reuse of knowledge are of great significance for improving the efficiency of engineering design and reducing the duplication of work in design activities. A semi-automated knowledge acquisition method based on functional decomposition structure model is proposed for the diversified and structured knowledge forms in the engineering field. The construction of the structure template is completed based on functional decomposition, the named entity recognition technology is used to extract the key information related to the design from engineering texts, and then the topic clustering is realized based on the latent Dirichlet allocation model, based on which the key information and the functional decomposition structure are correlated. In accordance with the proposed method and procedure, the design of the prototype system is accomplished, and the complete functional decomposition and knowledge acquisition process are illustrated by the design of an automatic weapon and its breech locking mechanism. The result shows that the proposed method can be used effectively to reduce the human-involved work in the knowledge acquisition process. Knowledge reuse based on this can adapt to designers’ thinking and provide the knowledge of related fields for designers.

Key words: automaticweapon, knowledgeacquisition, knowledgereuse, namedentityrecognition, topicmodel