Supporting Constraint-Aided Conceptual Design from First Principles in Autodesk Inventor

Engineering conceptual design can be defined as that phase of the product development process during which the designer takes a specification for a product to be designed and generates many broad solutions for it. It is well recognized that few computational tools exist that are capable of supporting the designer work through the conceptual phase of design. This paper presents a prototype constraint-based computer-aided design (CAD) technology, developed as an add-in to Autodesk Inventor, which can be used to support designers working in the early stages of design. The prototype has, at its core, a constraint filtering system based on generalized arc-consistency processing and backtrack search. We present aspects of our current prototype, focusing in particular on those aspects related to the interactive specification, development and configuration of the designer's concepts from an initial high-level specification

AAAI 2000 workshop reports

The AAAI-2000 Workshop Program was held Sunday and Monday, 3031 July 2000 at the Hyatt Regency Austin and the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. The 15 workshops held were (1) Agent-Oriented Information Systems, (2) Artificial Intelligence and Music, (3) Artificial Intelligence and Web Search, (4) Constraints and AI Planning, (5) Integration of AI and OR: Techniques for Combinatorial Optimization, (6) Intelligent Lessons Learned Systems, (7) Knowledge-Based Electronic Markets, (8) Learning from Imbalanced Data Sets, (9) Learning Statistical Models from Rela-tional Data, (10) Leveraging Probability and Uncertainty in Computation, (11) Mobile Robotic Competition and Exhibition, (12) New Research Problems for Machine Learning, (13) Parallel and Distributed Search for Reasoning, (14) Representational Issues for Real-World Planning Systems, and (15) Spatial and Temporal Granularity