Knowledge management has recently become the focus of public
attention in business and engineering. Because knowledge
acquisition is situated in the upstream of knowledge management,
capturing knowledge is an important step for enterprises to
achieve successful knowledge management. We focus on how
engineers solve their design problems under given design
contexts and propose a novel model and methods to capture
knowledge from engineering design processes. Our goal is to
acquire know-how knowledge without disrupting the normal
design process. A three-layer design process model
is introduced to represent generic design processes, and a
grammar and extended dynamic programming (GEDP) method
is developed based on the process model. GEDP adopts the
grammar approach and EDP to automatically identify
meaningful clusters, called operations, from primitive
design events. Our approach is evaluated through a
case study of designing a double-reduction gear system.