A Dialogue Module at the Conceptual Product Design Stage through Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

Conceptual product design involves a series of the designer’s creative thinking processes and consecutive communication with other disciplines are required in this stage to reach a final solution. During this stage, for example, different format of dialogues between designers and engineers, salesmen and customers are required to collect information about the product concept. For the product designers, the decision making procedure in this stage is the configuration inside the black box where designers’ mental activities are frequently misunderstood. Another problem usually found in the conceptual product design stage is that product designers are ignorant of the product requirements defined by others due to insufficient communication. In order to enhance the performance of the conceptual product design, a novel approach based on genetic algorithm (GA) is presented in this paper. Using GA, a dialogue module is established to reproduce feasible design solutions and the evaluation of these alternatives are then calculated inside the dialogue module. The process of conceptual product design is similar to the idea evolution with implementation of GA. An application of the proposed method is also presented briefly in this paper.