How explicit are we in a design meeting:Investigation on meeting knowledge structuring with design rationale

Knowledge management can improve a company's competitiveness by managing organisational knowledge as a company's capital. However, the knowledge produced in a meeting is hard to be captured due to its collective and volatile nature. In this paper, we want to zoom into the issue of knowledge management for design meetings. Since it is impossible for an individual to reconstruct the group decision making process without any personal bias, and designers are incapable or reluctant to document collectively their reasoning process during a meeting, we want to investigate the feasibility to reconstruct the design rationale of a naturalistic small group meeting, based on a collection of meeting recordings. We want to examine how much explicit knowledge can be extracted from our meeting data. A semantic network based design rationale model is proposed to classify the meeting data, and we will demonstrate the result of using design rationale as a knowledge representation for naturalistic design meeting, as well as the limit of this representation.</p

A Tool for Supporting Conceptual Design of Multiple State Mechanical Devices

Research into conceptual design of mechanical systems has evolved as an area of interest since last few decades. Conceptual design plays a significant role as an early stage of design to produce designs with higher quality by economically exploring a larger solution space. Several attempts have been made by researchers to automate the conceptual design synthesis process using computer support. However, most of that work has been focused on single state design problems. This paper deals with multiple state mechanical design problems and proposes a systematic method for synthesizing a larger solution space. A web-based tool is developed to guide designers through the step-by-step synthesis process by providing automated retrieval of initial solution proposals and modification rules

Evaluating Biological Systems for Their Potential in Engineering Design

A team of biologists, engineers, and cognitive scientists has been working together for the past five years, teaching an upper level undergraduate course in biologically inspired design where half the class of forty students are biologists and other physical scientists and the other half are engineers (mechanical, materials, industrial, others). From this experience, we provide insights on how to teach students to evaluate biological systems for their potential in engineering design. We have found that at first, students are not familiar with developing their own question since, in most engineering design classes, the problem is prescribed along with clients who would like to have them solved. In our class, we challenge the students with defining a significant problem. The students with common challenges then are placed together in an interdisciplinary team with at least one biologist and one engineer. A detailed problem decomposition follows, identifying the hierarchy of systems and clearly specifying functions. This is essential for the next step of analogical reasoning. Analogical reasoning as applied to BID is a process of matching biological functions to engineered functions and transferring functions and mechanisms from biology to engineering. For each desired function, students may ask: what mechanisms does nature use for achieving the function? This question guides the exploration of the wealth of knowledge in biology by asking them to clearly define the function of interest, then search for natural processes that perform this function. To expand on this search space, the students next make a list of the same function performed by other organisms for a comparative analysis to deepen their understanding and extract key biological principles. Students then invert the function and identify keywords to search. They also must refer to general biology books to identify key organisms that perform the function the best (and hence are included in textbooks). Using databases, such as the Web of Science functions, they can try to select the ‘best’ articles. If one is lucky, a single biological system may serve as a near perfect match to lead to a successful BID. However, some of the most innovative designs are built from more than one biological system, something that evolution cannot always do. We call these compound analogies. At this point, the design iteration can take on a different approach, namely solution based rather than problem based. Here, the team takes a natural system and asks, how can this biological principle improve an engineered design or function. These twin processes: solution vs problem-based approaches both have led to innovative and creative design concepts in this interdisciplinary class. Key words: Biological systems; engineering design; interdisciplinary clas

A formal functional representation methodology for conceptual design of material-flow processing devices

Although there has been considerable computer-aided conceptual design research, most of the proposed approaches are domain specific and can merely achieve conceptual design of energy flows-processing systems. Therefore, this research is devoted to the development of a general (i.e., domain-independent) and knowledge-based methodology that can search in a wide multidisciplinary solution space for suitable solution principles for desired material-flow processing functions without designers' biases toward familiar solution principles. It first proposes an ontology-based approach for representing desired material-flow processing functions in a formal and unambiguous manner. Then a rule-based approach is proposed to represent the functional knowledge of a known solution principle in a general and flexible manner. Thereafter, a simulation-based retrieval approach is developed, which can search for suitable solution principles for desired material-flow processing functions. The proposed approaches have been implemented as a computer-aided conceptual design system for test. The conceptual design of a coin-sorting device demonstrates that our functional representation methodology can make the proposed computer-aided conceptual design system to effectively and precisely retrieve suitable solution principles for a desired material-flow processing function

Requirements Modeling: from Natural Language to Conceptual Models Using Recursive Object Model (ROM) Analysis

Requirements elicitation and modeling are critical for the success of product development not only in software engineering but also in other engineering fields. Collecting the right requirements at each stage and transforming them into conceptual models are essential in delivering a successful product. In most cases, original requirements are represented by natural language in engineering. However, a key challenge faced by industries is to transform existing loosely structured legacy requirements document into the structured representations. This transformation process is extremely time-consuming and prone-to-error. Some efforts in research have been made to develop automatic or semi-automatic processes to bridge natural language and formal representation. Motivated by both the strong industrial need to automatically formalize natural language based requirements (NLR) and the research breakthrough in product requirements modeling, this present thesis proposes a new approach to transforming product requirements from their unrestricted natural language representation to structured conceptual models by using Recursive Object Model (ROM). The proposed approach includes the following three main aspects: 1) developing criteria for the completeness and necessity of design requirements corresponding to certain design stage, 2) developing a dynamic requirements elicitation approach to refine requirements, and 3) developing algorithms for transforming design requirements from natural language to conceptual models, such as Use Case Model by Universal Modeling Language (UML) and Function-Behavior-State (FBS) model. This presented research involves Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, in conjunction with question asking (QA) strategy and conceptual modeling algorithms. The significant tasks include defining the scope of the right requirements, automatically question asking to elicit requirements, formulating the transformation of requirements text into conceptual models, generating the rules for the conceptual modeling, developing algorithms based on the transformation rules, and finally automating the requirements modeling process through software prototypes. The research foundation of this thesis is the Environment Based Design (EBD) methodology which is derived from axiomatic theory of design modeling (ATDM). To bridge the gap between unrestricted natural language and formal conceptual models, an intermediate representation, ROM, is the core for representing the semantics of design requirements throughout the requirements evolution process

The Architect's Collaborator: Toward Intelligent Tools for Conceptual Design

In early stages of architectural design, as in other design domains, the language used is often very abstract. In architectural design, for example, architects and their clients use experiential terms such as "private" or "open" to describe spaces. If we are to build programs that can help designers during this early-stage design, we must give those programs the capability to deal with concepts on the level of such abstractions. The work reported in this thesis sought to do that, focusing on two key questions: How are abstract terms such as "private" and "open" translated into physical form? How might one build a tool to assist designers with this process? The Architect's Collaborator (TAC) was built to explore these issues. It is a design assistant that supports iterative design refinement, and that represents and reasons about how experiential qualities are manifested in physical form. Given a starting design and a set of design goals, TAC explores the space of possible designs in search of solutions that satisfy the goals. It employs a strategy we've called dependency-directed redesign: it evaluates a design with respect to a set of goals, then uses an explanation of the evaluation to guide proposal and refinement of repair suggestions; it then carries out the repair suggestions to create new designs. A series of experiments was run to study TAC's behavior. Issues of control structure, goal set size, goal order, and modification operator capabilities were explored. In addition, TAC's use as a design assistant was studied in an experiment using a house in the process of being redesigned. TAC's use as an analysis tool was studied in an experiment using Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie houses

Towards a software framework for reconfigurable and adaptive fixturing systems

There is an ongoing trend towards advanced fixturing systems that can be automatically reconfigured for different workpieces and dynamically adapt the clamping forces during the manufacturing process. However, the increased utilisation of computer technology and sensor feedback currently requires a significant amount of programming effort during the development phase and deployment of such fixtures which impairs their successful industrial realisation. This research addresses the issue by developing the core concepts of a novel software framework that facilitates the deployment and operation of reconfigurable and adaptive fixturing systems. This includes a new data model for the representation of the fixturing system, using object-oriented modelling techniques. Secondly, a generic methodology for the automatic reconfiguration of fixturing systems has been developed that can be applied to a plethora of different fixture layouts. Thirdly, a flexible communication infrastructure is proposed which supports the platform-independent communication between the various parts of the fixturing system through the adoption of a publish/subscribe approach. The integration of these core knowledge contributions into a software framework significantly reduces the programming effort by providing a ready-to-use infrastructure that can be configured according a given fixture layout. In order to manage the complexity of the research, a structured research methodology has been followed. Based on an extensive literature review, a number of knowledge gaps have been identified which were the basis for the definition of clear research objectives. A use case analysis has been conducted to identify the requirements of the software framework and several potential middleware technologies have been assessed for the communication infrastructure. This was followed by the development of the three core knowledge contributions. Finally, the research results have been demonstrated and initially verified with a prototype of a reconfigurable fixturing system, indicating that the utilisation of the software framework can eliminate the need for programming, thereby drastically reducing deployment effort and lead time

Towards a software framework for reconfigurable and adaptive fixturing systems

There is an ongoing trend towards advanced fixturing systems that can be automatically reconfigured for different workpieces and dynamically adapt the clamping forces during the manufacturing process. However, the increased utilisation of computer technology and sensor feedback currently requires a significant amount of programming effort during the development phase and deployment of such fixtures which impairs their successful industrial realisation. This research addresses the issue by developing the core concepts of a novel software framework that facilitates the deployment and operation of reconfigurable and adaptive fixturing systems. This includes a new data model for the representation of the fixturing system, using object-oriented modelling techniques. Secondly, a generic methodology for the automatic reconfiguration of fixturing systems has been developed that can be applied to a plethora of different fixture layouts. Thirdly, a flexible communication infrastructure is proposed which supports the platform-independent communication between the various parts of the fixturing system through the adoption of a publish/subscribe approach. The integration of these core knowledge contributions into a software framework significantly reduces the programming effort by providing a ready-to-use infrastructure that can be configured according a given fixture layout. In order to manage the complexity of the research, a structured research methodology has been followed. Based on an extensive literature review, a number of knowledge gaps have been identified which were the basis for the definition of clear research objectives. A use case analysis has been conducted to identify the requirements of the software framework and several potential middleware technologies have been assessed for the communication infrastructure. This was followed by the development of the three core knowledge contributions. Finally, the research results have been demonstrated and initially verified with a prototype of a reconfigurable fixturing system, indicating that the utilisation of the software framework can eliminate the need for programming, thereby drastically reducing deployment effort and lead time