FILTERING ALGORITHM FOR CLASSIFYING THE FEASIBLE SOLUTIONSPACE FROM DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS AND COMMITMENTS

摘要

1.0 Abstract It has become common practice for engineering designers to adopt a concurrent engineering design approach whereby products are being designed with consideration for their whole Iifeecycle not just for their use phase. This means that fabrication and assembly issues, product servicing, product disposal and other issues of the product from conception to grave are also taken into account for the product to be competitive in the market during the early stages of design. Products are becoming very complex because of their minitiarization in size and incorporation of a number of disciplines, that are not only engineering related but include other disciplines. Thus engineering design has become a very knowledge-intensive activity, with designers requiring support when taking design decision commitments as they have become too complex for the designer to handle on an individual basis. Several computer aided Decision Support Systems (DSSs) have, as a result, been developed to aid designers in their work. However, a major shortcoming of these systems is that they first allow the designer to take a decision and afterwards provide support in the form of consequences of these decisions on the product life-cycle. This tends to result in a lot of iterations and consequently loss of design time until the designer arrives at a life-oriented solution. The aim of this invention is therefore to provide support to the designer before a decision is taken so that a lot of iterations are eliminated. The novelty lies in the approach that is adopted to assist the designer and its implementation in an algorithm and eventually in a framework for a DSS. The approach, together with its algorithm and framework implementation, are applicable not only in the field of engineering design but also in other areas involving the processing of specifications and related decision making such as software design, architecture design, service design, planning, etc.