Preserving a Rich Legacy of Swedish Engineering Design using Artificial Intelligence (SweDesAI)

July 2024 – July 2025

Objective
To develop an AI-driven information retrieval system for connecting engineers with existing enterprise design knowledge in a transparent and semantic manner.

Background
Engineers with design experience predating computational tools are retiring. At the same time, widespread and informal use of generative language modeling cheapens documentation, threatening to bury records of human creativity. We work with our industry partner NEKTAB (Nordic Electric Power Technology AB) to use AI-based language models for the structuring and semantic retrieval of multimodal artifacts of engineering design. Rather than generatively guess at answers, our method emphasizes transparency in connecting questions to actual instances of prior documented information, an important feature for preserving engineering knowledge.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
This involves collaboration between computer scientists and mechanical engineers, and involves fields of natural language processing, data engineering, solid mechanics, and engineering design.