Evolutionary Design of Artifacts by Functional Module-Based Crossover

摘要

From Value Engineering perspective, we analyze artifacts focusing on their functions and represent them by using tree-like diagrams, which naturally reflect design knowledge embedded in existing artifacts. Regarding such diagrams, what we call Functional Diagrams (FDs), as phenotypes in Genetic Algorithm, artifacts can be evolved to form new artifacts. FD represents the functional composition of an artifact and the relation between functions and structureal features of the artifact Each sub-tree of FDs represents a functional module. Hence a crossover operation (exchange of subtrees) can be readily seen as a reconstruction of functional compositions. Along with the GA processes, useful functional modules are extracted from FDs and utilized to find better design solutions. This We adopt Simulated-Breeding technique in the Genetic Algorithm, which does not refer to mechanized fitness evaluations.