The development of new products of high quality, low unit cost, and short lead time to market are the key elements required for any enterprise to obtain a competitive advantage. For shorting the lead time to market and improving the creativity and performances of the product, a rule-based conceptual design approach and a methodology to simulate the conceptual design results generated in conceptual design process in automatical virtual entity form are presented in this paper. This part of paper presents a rule-based conceptual design method for generating creative conceptual design schemes of mechanisms based on Yan’s kinematic chain regeneration creative design method. The design rules are adopted to describe the design requirements of the functional characteristics, the connection relationships and topological characteristics among mechanisms. Through the graphs-based reasoning process, the conceptual design space is expanded extremely, and the potential creative conceptual design results are then dug out. By refining the design rules, the solution exploration problem is avioded, and the tendentious conceptual design schemes are generated. Since mechanical, electrical and hydraulic subsystems can be transformed into general mechansims, the conceptual design method presented in this paper can also be applied in the conceptual design problem of complex mechatronic systems. And then the method to identify conceptual design schemes is given.
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