Abstract
Knowledge re-use in vehicle development programs is problematic. The reasoning underlying a design is mostly not found back in the project documentation. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the organisation hinders the exchange of experiences directly between people. In this paper we propose an approach to improve the re-use of development knowledge by capturing and retrieving design decisions and the underlying argumentation. We explain how an organisation can capture this information efficiently and how it is structured it for easy retrieval. Currently, we are implementing an information system that supports this approach. In an example we demonstrate how it contributes to accelerated design processes.