Technical noteA knowledge-based framework for creative conceptual design of multi-disciplinary systems
Introduction
Creative design is pivotal for manufacturing enterprises to gain competence advantages since it can deliver novel products to the markets. In engineering design, the novelty of a new artifact can be understood from two perspectives. One is that the new artifact has some novel functions, though the Principle Solution (abbreviated as “PS” later) of each function is not new. Here, PS refers to the physical mechanism of a system for achieving a desired function [1]. The other is that it employs novel PSs to fulfill its existing functions, with better performance achieved. Correspondingly, there are two Creative Conceptual Design (CCD) strategies. One is to encourage designers to think openly to discover new functions and integrate their PSs into an artifact. The other is to encourage them to adopt novel PSs to innovate existing artifacts. For both strategies, designers should explore wide multi-disciplinary solution spaces for generating novel or promising PSs.
Such multi-disciplinary exploration tasks, however, are often very difficult for human designers, who are merely taught with knowledge about certain disciplines. In fact, they often have to rely on the solution knowledge in familiar discipline(s) to generate PSs, which, though, can lead to the loss of novel or promising PSs. Today this issue becomes even worse, since many new solution principles are discovered in various disciplines at a very fast speed, making it impossible for human designers to learn and utilize them for creative design in time. Therefore, a Computer-Aided Conceptual Design (abbreviated as CACD later) tool should be developed to help human designers achieve the CCD of multi-disciplinary systems.
However, few studies have been carried out on CCD of multi-disciplinary systems, though many CACD studies have been done. Multi-disciplinary systems here refer to the engineering systems that comprise components from various engineering disciplines, such as mechanical, hydraulic, electrical, electronics, photoelectric, and energy disciplines. Our research will focus on developing a knowledge-based system for CCD of multi-disciplinary systems. Since the whole PS of a complex system can be decomposed into some basic PSs, a reasonable CCD approach is then to reuse such basic PSs and integrate them in a system for achieving a desired function, which is also the approach adopted here. Our multi-disciplinary CCD approach involves first building a knowledge base of such basic PSs, and then selecting suitable known PSs and creatively synthesizing them together. The work reported here is an extension of our functional representation research in [2]. The current paper also develops a novel algorithm for achieving design synthesis of multi-disciplinary PSs. The rest of the paper presents the related work, the proposed approaches and their implementation.
Section snippets
Literature review
Due to limited space, only some typical CACD systems are reviewed here. Interested readers can find more in some review or research papers, e.g. in [3] or [4]. Existing CACD systems can be classified as reuse-oriented systems and creation-oriented systems. The reuse-oriented CACD systems often aim at modeling the artifact knowledge of a total engineering system for guiding subsequent design of similar systems. For examples, the FBS modeler employs the Function-Behavior-State approach to model
Functional representation
Function refers to the general relationship between the input and the output of a system aiming at performing a task [1]. Since function plays a critical role in conceptual design, its representation is critical for a CCD system. Here, functional representation is classified as the representation of desired functions, and the representation of the functions achieved by known PSs, which is called the representation of functional knowledge for brevity here. Since flows are the primary components
A HOSS-based synthesis approach
Depending on how functions are represented, there are two design synthesis approaches, i.e. the flow name-chaining approach (e.g. in [18]), and the traditional state space search approach (e.g. in [9]). Since our functional representation approach differs significantly from previous ones, a new approach, called the HOSS-based synthesis approach, is developed here to achieve CCD of multi-disciplinary systems. Here, HOSS is the abbreviation of Heterogeneous Object State Search, which means that
Implementation
Using ASP.NET in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 as the web application development tool and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 as a relational database system, a browser/server architecture-based prototype system, called ICCDP (Intelligent Creative Conceptual Design Platform), has been developed for implementing the proposed multi-disciplinary CCD framework. ICCDP is primarily composed of three sub-systems, i.e. the basic data management sub-system, the PS knowledge management sub-system and the
Conclusions and future work
The proposed approach for CCD of multi-disciplinary systems paves a way for designers to integrate PSs from various disciplines into a multi-disciplinary system for achieving a desired function. It is primarily composed of a formal approach for representing a desired function, a domain-independent approach for representing functional knowledge of known PSs, and a HOSS-based synthesis approach for automated CCD multi-disciplinary systems. A prototype system, called Intelligent Creative
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the reviewers and the editors for their constructive suggestions. This research is supported by Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Granted No. 2008AA04Z108), Natural Science Foundation of China (Granted No. 50975173 and 50935004) and Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (Granted No. 09QA1402800).
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