A new model to express and capture the design rationale in the documents

Jihong Liu,Kejian Wang,Jiaji Wang,Bing Xu,Yinong Chen

doi:10.1051/matecconf/201713900016

Abstract

As important design knowledge, design rationale(DR) knowledge plays an important role in design analysis, design reasoning and design innovation. There are generally two sources of DR knowledge, one is to capture DR in the design process, and the other is to extract DR from historical design documents, but the latter is always ignored. DR model is the foundation of DR. This paper aims at the deficiency of the previous DR model and requirements for DR knowledge acquisition from design documents. We propose design rationale knowledge hierarchy (DRKH) model. The model has three layers, design intent layer, design decision layer and design basis layer. The model also has three relationships, decomposed-into, achieved-by, refer-to. Using the DRKH model, we build the algorithm framework for extracting DR from design documents. Finally, we validate the feasibility of our model by extracting DR model from a welding robot design manual.

Highlights

Product design is the process of converting a person's purpose or need into a specific physical or tool
DR knowledge includes all relevant knowledge of product design, such as design intent decomposed for completing the product, design option made for completing the design intent, discussion of design decisions in the design process, reasons behind the design decisions, and so on [3]
Taking into account the above DR knowledge acquisition source and the DR knowledge expression model problems, this paper proposes a new DR model for DR knowledge representation, which aims at extracting the DR knowledge in design documents

Summary

Introduction

Product design is the process of converting a person's purpose or need into a specific physical or tool. There are two sources of DR knowledge acquisition, one is stored the designer's thoughts about product design during the design process; the other is extracted DR knowledge from structured documents. Most of the studies are committed to capture DR knowledge during the design process, while ignoring the structured design document which as an important source of DR knowledge acquisition. This resulted in a great deal of waste of DR knowledge. If there is an access method that can effectively extract DR knowledge from design documents, it will play a significant role in promoting the establishment of DR knowledge base

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion