Design Repository Research Articles

Expanding the Solution Space in Engineering Design Education: A Simulation-Based Investigation of Product Dissection

Product dissection has been highlighted as an effective means of interacting with example products in order to produce creative outcomes. While product dissection is often conducted as a team in engineering design education, the research on the effectiveness of product dissection activities has been primarily limited to individuals. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the type(s) of product dissected in a team environment on encouraging creative design outcomes (variety, novelty, and quantity) and the underlying influence of educational level and dissection modality on these effects. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 14,000 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique using a design repository of 931 ideas generated by first-year and senior engineering students. The results of the study highlight the importance of educational level, dissection modality, and the number of products dissected on team design outcomes. Specifically, virtual dissection encouraged the exploration of more novel solutions across both educational levels. However, physical dissection encouraged the exploration of a larger variety and quantity of ideas for senior teams while virtual dissection encouraged the same in first-year teams. Finally, dissecting different types of products allowed teams to explore a larger solution space. The findings presented in this study can lead to a better understanding of how to deploy product dissection modules in engineering design education in order to drive creative design outcomes.

Knowledge-based active push system for ecological design

With the arrival of the era of big data, large amounts of information need to be stored and computed. The complicated data analysis makes it impossible to extract, select and apply knowledge of eco-design in a short time. Considering the dynamics and reliability in the design process, this paper presents an approach to accelerate eco-design by establishing an active push system. The system mainly includes the following parts: the user design capability model, the database module (enterprise database, ecological design repository), the resource matching module, active push module, machine learning module. At last the design process of automobile transmission is used to explain the validity and rationality of the system. The test shows the system can reduce design time and optimize the design process when the product characteristics are related to ecological design.

Building Open-Source Digital Curation Services and Repositories at Scale

The focus of this article is to share several in-progress research and development open-source approaches that seek to design, build, and test digital curation services and repositories that have the potential to scale (the IMLS-funded Fedora DRAS-TIC and the NSF-funded Brown Dog). We also discuss the creation of a big records testbed of justice, human rights, and cultural heritage collections (100 TB and 100 million records), the emergence of Computational Archival Science (CAS), and the resulting efforts at integrating digital curation education and research. We ultimately seek to develop a sustainable community of users and developers, with solutions that serve the international library, archives, and scientific data management communities. We are also focused on digital curation training and education in these innovative environments.

System Design through the Exploration of Contemporary Web Services

In this article, we develop a Contemporary Web Service (CWS) repository of system designs, which are encoded as metadata of contemporary web services. We examine if this CWS repository serves as an effective design tool for initial CWS design and as an effective support tool for business users and analysts working together on system design. The CWS repository reduces the cognitive load of both the analyst and the business user as they jointly explore the CWS repository of system designs. It supports an evolutionary approach to system design through rapid selection of appropriate CWS metadata. To accomplish that, we introduce several new design characteristics for the CWS repository. The evaluation results demonstrate that the CWS repository is an effective tool for supporting designers during initial service design, as well as for supporting business users and analysts during system design.

A Computational Workflow for the Automated Generation of Models of Genetic Designs.

Computational models are essential to engineer predictable biological systems and to scale up this process for complex systems. Computational modeling often requires expert knowledge and data to build models. Clearly, manual creation of models is not scalable for large designs. Despite several automated model construction approaches, computational methodologies to bridge knowledge in design repositories and the process of creating computational models have still not been established. This paper describes a workflow for automatic generation of computational models of genetic circuits from data stored in design repositories using existing standards. This workflow leverages the software tool SBOLDesigner to build structural models that are then enriched by the Virtual Parts Repository API using Systems Biology Open Language (SBOL) data fetched from the SynBioHub design repository. The iBioSim software tool is then utilized to convert this SBOL description into a computational model encoded using the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML). Finally, this SBML model can be simulated using a variety of methods. This workflow provides synthetic biologists with easy to use tools to create predictable biological systems, hiding away the complexity of building computational models. This approach can further be incorporated into other computational workflows for design automation.

Frank Lloyd Wright's posthumous architecture

In recent years, there has been a spate of posthumously built works by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the architect's archive as a kind of repository of designs that can be adapted for new clients, programmes and sites, these buildings stake out an ambiguous claim upon Wright's name and legacy. The growing body of posthumous architecture presents a range of often unacknowledged and unexamined challenges to Wright's celebrated canon of built works, and to the architectural discipline more generally, troubling conservationists, historians, tourists and foundations alike. These problematic buildings are the subject of this essay, which examines the contemporary appeal of Wright's archive and “brand,” to open up serious questions about the authenticity, authorship and authorisation of an architect's works realised long after their death.

Automated Extraction of Function Knowledge From Text

This paper presents a method to automatically extract function knowledge from natural language text. The extraction method uses syntactic rules to acquire subject-verb-object (SVO) triplets from parsed text. Then, the functional basis taxonomy, WordNet, and word2vec are utilized to classify the triplets as artifact-function-energy flow knowledge. For evaluation, the function definitions associated with 30 most frequent artifacts compiled in a human-constructed knowledge base, Oregon State University's design repository (DR), were compared to the definitions identified by extraction the method from 4953 Wikipedia pages classified under the category “Machines.” The method found function definitions for 66% of the test artifacts. For those artifacts found, 50% of the function definitions identified were compiled in the DR. In addition, 75% of the most frequent function definitions found by the method were also defined in the DR. The results demonstrate the potential of the current work in enabling automated construction of function knowledge repositories.

Comparing function structures and pruned function structures for market price prediction: An approach to benchmarking representation inferencing value

AbstractBenchmarking function modeling and representation approaches requires a direct comparison, including the inferencing support by the different approaches. To this end, this paper explores the value of a representation by comparing the ability of a representation to support reasoning based on varying amounts of information stored in the representational components of a function structure: vocabulary, grammar, and topology. This is done by classifying the previously developed functional pruning rules into vocabulary, grammatical, and topological classes and applying them to function structures available from an external design repository. The original and pruned function structures of electromechanical devices are then evaluated for how accurately market values can be predicted using the graph complexity connectivity method. The accuracy is found to be inversely related to the amount of information and level of detail. Applying the topological rule does not significantly impact the predictive power of the models, while applying the vocabulary rules and the grammar rules reduces the accuracy of the predictions. Finally, the least predictive model set is that which had all rules applied. In this manner, the value of a representation to predict or answer questions is quantified.

Free and Open Source 3-D Model Customizer for Websites to Democratize Design with OpenSCAD

3-D printing has entered the consumer market because of recent radical price declines. Consumers can save substantial money by offsetting purchases with DIY pre-designed 3-D printed products. However, even more value can be obtained with distributed manufacturing using mass customization. Unfortunately, the average consumer is not technically sophisticated enough to easily design their own products. One solution to this is the use of an overlay on OpenSCAD parametric code, although current solutions force users to relinquish all rights to their own designs. There is thus a substantial need in the open source design community for a libre 3-D model customizer, which can be used in any design repository to democratize design. This study reports on the design, function, and validation of such software: the Free Open Source 3-D Customizer. It is demonstrated with a case study of the customization of 3-D printable external breast prosthetics. The results showed that novice users can adjust the available parameters according to their needs and save these to a new file on a website. This PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) library is free and open source and has potential for increasing the usefulness of online repositories to enable distributed manufacturing using consumer customized 3-D printable products.

The Cloud Design System Building Research of Tourist Souvenirs

With the development of the society and the improving of people living standards, tourism industry becomes a sunrise industry. However, it is not conducive to the healthy development of the tourist industry that simply rely on ticket sales and government support way. From the angle of protecting Chinese traditional culture and improving the level of museum tourism development, converting the way and the idea of museum management, we put forward the concept of tourist souvenirs cloud design system. Tourist souvenirs cloud design system based on the digital museum, full use digital resources to build design repository, full use of the advanced technology, such as cloud computing, internet of things and cloud manufacturing, provide sustainable and systematic technical support of tourist souvenirs development. In this paper, we form the architecture design of the tourist souvenirs cloud design system, at the same time we verify the feasibility of cloud design system through the application of actual case. Tourist souvenirs cloud design system is not only conducive to the sustainable and healthy development of the tourist industry, but also is of great significance for the healthy development of cultural creative industry.

The Function-Based Design for Sustainability Method

Over the last two decades, consumers have become increasingly aware and desiring of sustainable products. However, little attention has been paid to developing conceptual design methods that explicitly take into account environmental impact. This paper contributes a method of automated function component generation, and guided down-selection and decision-making based upon environmental impact. The environmental impact of functions has been calculated for 17 of the products found in the Design Repository using ReCiPe scoring in SimaPRO. A hierarchical Bayesian approach is used to estimate the potential environmental impacts of specific functions when realized into components. Previously, product environmental impacts were calculated after a product was developed to the component design stage. The method developed in this paper could be used to provide a criticality ranking based on which functional solutions historically have the greatest risk of causing high environmental impact. The method is demonstrated using a simple clock system as an example. A comparative case study of two phone chargers for use in third-world countries demonstrates the decision-making capabilities of this method, and shows that it is possible to compare the environmental impact of alternative function structures during the conceptual stage of design. With the method presented in this paper, it is now possible to make early functional modeling design decisions specifically taking into account historical environmental impact of functionally similar products.

The development of a repository of innovative products (RIP) for inspiration in engineering design

The research presented in this paper introduces a new methodology for creative inspiration in product design using archived innovation information to emphasize a quick and efficient creative design process. The research presents a method to identify the innovative subsystems in a product and archive that information in a quick, efficient database for inspiration in concept design. The innovation information, when archived in a design repository, can support automatic concept generation that is biased toward creative concepts. This concept generation method is proposed as a tool for engineers to aid the creativity of designs and to assess their concepts based on creativity and innovation. Products featured in recent published lists of innovative products are reverse engineered to expose the component and functional relationships. A function subtraction method based on difference rewards is introduced to isolate innovation-related functions and components in order to populate a repository of innovative products (RIP). Initial results from two classroom studies are presented to examine the innovation of the products at the functional and component levels and support the utility of the RIP. This provides support that recent innovation information can be used in creative design using the data collection method proposed.

A Competency-Based Ontology for Learning Design Repositories

Learning designs are central resources for educational environments because they provide the organizational structure of learning activities; they are concrete instructional methods. We characterize each learning design by the competencies they target. We define competencies at the meta-knowledge level, as generic processes acting on domain-specific knowledge. We summarize a functional taxonomy of generic skills that draws upon three fields of knowledge: education, software engineering and artificial intelligence. This taxonomy provides the backbone of an ontology for learning designs, enabling the creation of a library of learning designs based on their cognitive and meta-cognitive properties.

An approach to product solution generation and evaluation based on the similarity theory and Ant Colony Optimisation

An approach to product solution generation is proposed to analyse the conceptual design activities in this paper. In this approach, the sub-functions are defined with the functional basis, and the chief sub-function chain is generated from the constructed functional model. A design repository is developed to store the relationships of sub-functions and artificial components. The similarity theory is used to analyse the compatibility of two adjacent components in a design solution, and the compatibility is described by the generalised distance (GD). The evaluation criteria and weightings of sub-functions are provided and used to select components for a design solution. Under the premise of regarding GD as the path and taking the evaluation score of a component as the pheromone, the Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) is used to automatically identify the appropriate design solutions. The requirements of sub-functions and the compatibility of two adjacent components are considered in a design solution by the proposed approach. Finally, a case of the 3-Axis Servo Transfer System is introduced to illustrate the application of the proposed approach.

Mining Functional Model Graphs to Find Product Design Heuristics With Inclusive Design Illustration

Engineering design heuristics offer the potential to improve the design process and resultant designs. Currently, heuristics are empirically derived by experts. The goal of this paper is to automate the heuristics generation process. Functional modeling, a well-established product representation framework, is applied in this research to abstract the intended functionality of a product. Statistically significant heuristics, extracted from a database of functional models, serve as design suggestions or guidelines for concept generation. The heuristics can further be applied to automate portions of the concept generation process. Prior research efforts in automated concept generation rely heavily on the design repository. The repository needs to be appended for broader categories of design problems, and, at the same time, a tool for quick analysis of the expanded repository is required. An automated heuristic extraction process has the capability to efficiently mine the updated repositories and find new heuristics for design practice. A key objective of this research is to develop design heuristics applicable in the diverse and challenging domain of inclusive design. The research applies graph theory for mathematical representation of the functional model, graph visualization for comprehending graphs, and graph data mining to extract heuristics. The results show that the graphical representation of functional models along with graph visualization allows quick updates to the design repository. In addition, we show that graph data mining has the capability to efficiently search for new design heuristics from the updated repository.

An Efficient Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for Interface-Based Modular Product Design and Performance Evaluation

In our earlier work, we have proposed a cyberinfrastructure-based collaboration system for modular product design. One of the main components of the system is a design repository to which suppliers can upload the descriptions of their components using machine-readable, interface-based component description language, so that manufacturers can refer to the descriptions during product design phases. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithmic approach based on a branch-and-bound (BnB) algorithm to support product design using the interface-based component descriptions stored in the design repository. This product design problem is categorized into a planning problem, whose complexity is known as non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard. For performance evaluation, we compare the performance of the branch-and-bound algorithm with that of a depth-first search (DFS) algorithm, which is an exhaustive search method. This paper describes the details of the proposed branch-and-bound algorithm using a case study and experimental results are discussed.

The Meaning of “Near” and “Far”: The Impact of Structuring Design Databases and the Effect of Distance of Analogy on Design Output

This work lends insight into the meaning and impact of “near” and “far” analogies. A cognitive engineering design study is presented that examines the effect of the distance of analogical design stimuli on design solution generation, and places those findings in context of results from the literature. The work ultimately sheds new light on the impact of analogies in the design process and the significance of their distance from a design problem. In this work, the design repository from which analogical stimuli are chosen is the U.S. patent database, a natural choice, as it is one of the largest and easily accessed catalogued databases of inventions. The “near” and “far” analogical stimuli for this study were chosen based on a structure of patents, created using a combination of latent semantic analysis and a Bayesian based algorithm for discovering structural form, resulting in clusters of patents connected by their relative similarity. The findings of this engineering design study are juxtaposed with the findings of a previous study by the authors in design by analogy, which appear to be contradictory when viewed independently. However, by mapping the analogical stimuli used in the earlier work into similar structures along with the patents used in the current study, a relationship between all of the stimuli and their relative distance from the design problem is discovered. The results confirm that “near” and “far” are relative terms, and depend on the characteristics of the potential stimuli. Further, although the literature has shown that “far” analogical stimuli are more likely to lead to the generation of innovative solutions with novel characteristics, there is such a thing as too far. That is, if the stimuli are too distant, they then can become harmful to the design process. Importantly, as well, the data mapping approach to identify analogies works, and is able to impact the effectiveness of the design process. This work has implications not only in the area of finding inspirational designs to use for design by analogy processes in practice, but also for synthesis, or perhaps even unification, of future studies in the field of design by analogy.

Validation of Function Pruning Rules Through Similarity at Three Levels of Abstraction

Function modeling is often used in the conceptual design phase as an approach to capture a form-independent purpose of a product. Previous research uses a repository of reverse-engineered function models to support conceptual-based design tools, such as similarity and design-by-analogy. These models, however, are created at a different level of abstraction than models created in conceptual design for new products. In this paper, a set of pruning rules is developed to generate an abstract, conceptual-level model from a reverse-engineered function model. The conceptual-level models are compared to two additional levels of abstraction that are available in a design repository. The abstract models developed through the pruning rules are tested using a similarity metric to understand their usefulness in conceptual design. The similarity of 128 products is computed using the Functional Basis controlled vocabulary and a matrix-based similarity metric at each level of abstraction. A matrix-based clustering algorithm is then applied to the similarity results to identify groups of similar products. A subset of these products is studied to further compare the three levels of abstraction and to validate the pruning rules. It is shown that the pruning rules are able to convert reverse-engineered function models to conceptual-level models, better supporting design-by-analogy, a conceptual-stage design activity.

COSMOS: A Web-Based Repository of Learning Designs for Science Education

COSMOS: A Web-Based Repository of Learning Designs for Science Education

The Part Count Tool (PaCT) for Design Concept Selection

This paper presents a part count tool that predicts the part count for a particular product concept during the conceptual design phase. The part count tool will also aid in ranking the design concepts by the criterion of number of components for a product. This tool utilizes existing automated concept generation algorithms to generate the design concepts. It extracts the available data from the Design Engineering Lab Design Repository to determine an average number of parts per component type in the repository and then calculates an average part count for new concepts. The part count tool also uses an algorithm to determine how to connect two non-compatible components through the addition of mutually compatible components. While emphasis is placed on the average parts per product in evaluating designs, the overall functional requirement of the product is also considered.