Automatic Conceptual Design of Mechanical Devices Based on Reasoning the Design Rules

Abstract

This paper presents an automatic method for conceptual design of mechanical devices by embodying the functions to the graph carrier according to the design rules. Through “and”, “or”, “no” logical calculations, and “adjacency”, “overlap”, “topology” relation calculations among the basic fimctional forms supplied in this paper, the design rules can be defined. Since the design rule only reflects the logical relationships among the basic function forms, it is easily to be carried out by computers. By introducing imaginary function forms and defining special basic function forms, the system can deal with the conceptual design problem for complex mechanical devices. Comparing with enumerating manually method, by doing strict similarity analysis of links of graph carrier and exact logical calculation among basic functional forms, our method can efficiently avoid producing redundance schemes and missing suitable results, and will get all suitable results. The research has shown that the conceptual design results obtained by combination of basic simple mechanisms belong to a subset of the results group obtained by the method presented in this paper. The most prominent advantage of our method presented in this paper is that by refining the design rules, the conceptual design process is convergent, and optimal conceptual design solutions are available.