Diagrammatic Modeling Language for Conceptual Design of Technical Systems: a Way to Achieve Creativity

Abstract

The product development process begins with the phase of problem definition and requirements, and this is followed by the phase of conceptual design, which is the subject matter of this paper, with a focus on the creation of a design diagrammatic description. The conceptual design phase is acknowledged, as the particularly critical and significant decisions made in this phase affect all subsequent design phases. The purpose of the work reported in this paper is to introduce a flow-based diagrammatic language as an alternative approach to a currently dominant framework in the area that is based on the framework of the function-behavior-structure (FBS). The paper adopts the method of re-designing some examples from the object-oriented conceptual design in the context FBS, using the proposed diagrammatic modeling language. Accordingly, a major contribution here is showing the capability of this language in playing a pivotal role in the conceptual design domain. Additionally, we claim that the flows in the proposed representation could trigger design creativity as an appropriate searching space for determining the decomposition of the design.