Contribution of modelling the knowledge included in standards to the integration of machine safety requirements at the design stage

In the design of machines, the designer must face up to safety legislative obligations. These constraints, to be added to all the other requirements (costs, times, production...), are taken into account in a secondary way and often too late in the design process. Even if the designer has at his disposal a lot of frames (several directives, many standards), he is confronted with technical difficulties of implementation of this enormous quantity of information. The work presented in this report consists of an assistance in taking into account the safety regulations when designing machines. In order to not impose a new design process, our work is based on the differentiation between a stable and generic part of knowledge (standards) and a dynamic and particular part (design processes). This distinction justifies two complementary fields of study : the extraction and the formalisation of normative knowledge, and its exploitation. The step of knowledge extraction and knowledge formalisation, we propose, is based on the NIAM method (Nijssen Information Analysis Method), which allows to make a formal model of the knowledge contained in a textual expression. In order to facilitate the integration of this extracted and formalised knowledge, we propose an approach, called multi-viewpoints, aiming at bringing closer the technical sights of a machine with their normative sights. The multi-viewpoint approach and the NIAM method are thus applied to a particular type of machine : the mechanical press and its associated standard the NF EN 692 standard. The results allow us to state the development bases of an Assistance tool for Safe Machine Desig