Integration of Product Conceptual Design Synthesis into a Computer-Aided Design System

Commercial Computer-Aided Design systems have been mainly focused in give support to the process of capturing and representing geometric shapes and incorporating technological information. Conversely, 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 intended for applications stand-alone or are based on the heuristic knowledge of the designer. Such approaches are non-interoperable with the commercial computer-aided design systems which results in non-continuous information in the 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 is presented.