Integration of product conceptual design synthesis into a Computer-Aided Design system

Commercial Computer-Aided Design systems have mainly focused to support the process of capturing and representing geometric shapes and incorporating technological information. In contrast, few utilities in these systems are present to facilitate decision making in the early stages of the design process, such as the capture, modeling and conceptual design synthesis of solutions. Typical tasks of the conceptual design process in mechanical design are lead in applications stand-alone or are based on the heuristic knowledge of the designer. Such approaches are non-interoperable with de commercial computer-aided design systems, leading to discontinuous design information of design process. This study addresses this subject and proposes a method to improve the integration of product conceptual design synthesis into a Computer Aided Design system. To validate the feasibility of the approach implemented, a prototype application based on a Computer Aided Design system was developed and a study case was accomplishe