Conceptual Design Support System Research Articles

Progressive Concept Evaluation Method for Automatically Generated Concept Variants

Conceptual design is one of the most critical and important phases of design process with least computer support system. Conceptual design support tool (CDST) is a conceptual design support system developed to automatically generate concepts for each subfunction in functional structure. The automated concept generation process results in large number of concept variants which require a thorough evaluation process to select the best design. To address this, a progressive concept evaluation technique consisting of absolute comparison, concept screening and weighted decision matrix using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is proposed to eliminate infeasible concepts at each stage. The software implementation of the proposed method is demonstrated.

A framework for function‐based conceptual design support system

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the framework of conceptual design support tool (CDST) developed to assist designers during conceptual design process. The premise of the study is that, by combining human creativity with computer capabilities, it is possible to perform conceptual design process more efficiently than solely manual design. The study aims to show how conceptual design knowledge can be captured from experienced designers and kept in the computer system for later use and how the developed tool assists designers by handling some of the repetitive and time‐consuming tasks.Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual design process model, which integrates systematic design approach with knowledge‐based system, is proposed. Based on this model, a CDST, which consists of function library, alternative concepts database, different modules for conceptual design activities, and a knowledge‐based system is developed. The alternative concepts database is built based on design reuse philos...

A Knowledge-Based Conceptual Design Support System

Conceptual design process is considered as the most critical and important phase of product design process. It is the stage where product’s fundamental features are determined, large proportion of the lifecycle cost of the product is committed, and other major decisions are made, which have significant impact on the downstream design and related manufacturing processes. It is also a knowledge intensive process where diverse knowledge and several years of experience are put together to design quality and cost effective products. Unfortunately, computer support systems for this phase are lagging behind compared to the currently available commercial computer aided design (CAD) tools for the later stage of design. This paper proposes a knowledge-based conceptual design support system in which design concepts from existing products and previous experiences are captured and used to design future products. The conceptual design support system will assist designers during the conceptual design process by generating concepts on a morphology chart and handling some of the repetitive tasks. In addition, the generated concepts may inspire designers to generate new concepts. The design support system addresses the key features of conceptual design process such as functional analysis, concept generation and concept evaluation with aid of the production rules within the knowledge-based system.

J123011 仮説生成検証の動的展開に着目した概念設計支援システムのメカトロニクスシステム設計への展開([J12301]設計における情報共有・知識マネジメント)

J123011 仮説生成検証の動的展開に着目した概念設計支援システムのメカトロニクスシステム設計への展開([J12301]設計における情報共有・知識マネジメント)

Interaction Based Human Adaptive Conceptual Design Support System

This paper describes a human adaptive conceptual design system which designs the shape of a couple of Tableware. In the system, a framework of human adaptive approach is implemented based on the interaction between human and the system, by means of Interactive Evolutionary Computation. Users / beginner designers only carry out simple and subjective evaluation toward the automatically generated tableware shape by the system. The system re-generates the shape of tableware based on users' evaluation results, and presents users again. Repeating the interaction, users acquire satisfied design. The system uses rules of linguistic feature expression of the tableware's shape. Also, the system preserves rules, which are evaluated well by users, toward Database. Therefore, the users' own conceptual favorite shape features are preserved. These rules can be repeatedly applied in order to generate new kinds of tableware, which have the same concept.

Development of a Design Supporting System for Nano-Materials based on a Framework for Integrated Knowledge of Functioning-Manufacturing Process

In the recent materials research, much work aims at realization of ``functional materials'' by changing structure and/or manufacturing process with nanotechnology. However, knowledge about the relationship among function, structure and manufacturing process is not well organized. So, material designers have to consider a lot of things at the same time. It would be very helpful for them to support their design process by a computer system. In this article, we discuss a conceptual design supporting system for nano-materials. Firstly, we consider a framework for representing functional structures and manufacturing processes of nano-materials with relationships among them. We expand our former framework for representing functional knowledge based on our investigation through discussion with experts of nano-materials. The extended framework has two features: 1) it represents functional structures and manufacturing processes comprehensively, 2) it expresses parameters of function and ways with their dependencies because they are important for material design. Next, we describe a conceptual design support system we developed based on the framework with its functionalities. Lastly, we evaluate the utility of our system in terms of functionality for design supports. For this purpose, we tried to represent two real examples of material design. And then we did an evaluation experiment on conceptual design of material using our system with the collaboration of domain experts.

5425 概念設計支援システムのための思考プロセス評価(G12-1 設計と最適化,G12 設計工学・システム)

5425 概念設計支援システムのための思考プロセス評価(G12-1 設計と最適化,G12 設計工学・システム)

2414 創造的工学設計のための設計支援システムの評価(OS8 設計プロセスのマネジメントII)

In recent years, industrial designers are being required to design creative products in a short period. In the conceptual design, they who are using TRIZ hope that a process of thinking is aided for problem solving and problem analysis, because both the jump of idea and the mapping on to specific solution from generic solution are difficult. In this paper, Authors proposed the methodology of Conceptual Design Support System (CDSS) for the requirement, and estimate this methodology to satisfy the requirement by questionnaire. The effectiveness of this methodology is discussed through the result of them.

創造的工学設計のための設計支援システムの試作(設計支援手法・CAD/RP-I)

The authors present a Conceptual Design Support System(CDSS). To develop creative products for a short period of time, it is indispensable to support a designer by offering a series of forms. Although TRIZ provides the technique of supporting a way of thinking, it is not enough to support. Because an idea is not produced if a designer's insight is insufficient. In order to solve it, the system has a view of QFD and USIT in addition to TRIZ. Using a system which combines these techniques, it will be possible to clarify problems and to raise designer's insight much more.

A methodology for evolutionary product design

this paper describes a function-based approach for conceptual design support in the context of evolutionary product development. The main objective is to improve a designer’s productivity by the effective reuse of existing design information in design alternative identification, evaluation, and modification. An integrated evolutionary design methodology, EPD, is presented. The proposed methodology divides the whole process into three inter-related phases: information recovery, information management, and information reuse. The detailed steps in each phase are elaborated, and various techniques are employed to improve information reuse efficiency. A case study on commercial electrostatic air cleaner was used to illustrate the whole process of product evolutionary design. The proposed methodology will have a positive impact on the future development of the conceptual design support system.

Conceptual design support system in a collaborative environment for injection moulding

The shortened time-to-market of new products requires experts from multiple disciplines to cooperate in product development. In this collaborative product development environment, an Internet-based conceptual design support system for Injection moulding is developed. It can help designers to put forward feasible design solutions quickly and provide strong support for collaborative design. The architecture, implementation and evaluation of this system are discussed in this paper. The proposed system makes fully use of component-based web technology and has a flexible distributed architecture. A hybrid neural network and genetic algorithm approach is also adopted for more accurate and efficient retrieval. Experiment results indicate it is superior to conventional systems in accuracy and time.

2113 CD-Scenery : 設計議論を明確化する概念設計支援システム

2113 CD-Scenery : 設計議論を明確化する概念設計支援システム

ASA: A conceptual design-support system

This paper proposes a computational architecture for conceptual design support that integrates typical CAD editing activities with symbolic information processing. The architecture is composed of a knowledge representation server and a variational CAD system. The knowledge-representation server is based on a terminological language which is expressive enough to represent the knowledge involved in a design process, and to support the typical inferences used in a case-based design-support system. The knowledge-representation server contains both episodic knowledge, stored as cases in a long-term memory, and general domain knowledge. It supports the usual strategies of case-based design-support systems as case retrieval and case adaptation. The variational CAD environment processes the geometric information. The variational approach to the geometric representation of domain elements separates the metric aspects from the topological aspects of design artefacts. As a consequence, inferences on topology can be performed at a symbolic level, obtaining an increased integration between geometric and symbolic knowledge. The system is part of the ASA project, under development at the University of Ancona.