Computational Tools to Improve Innovation and Creativity in Engineering Design
Open Access
- Author:
- Godthi, Vamsy
- Graduate Program:
- Mechanical Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- Dr Cari Bryant Arnold, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Cari R Bryant Arnold, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- modular product design software
module description language
interface
component naming taxonomy
product design
conceptual design
computational tools
integer programming formulation
artificial intelligence planning - Abstract:
- This research advances previous work to create multi-disciplinary design tools that help designers generate innovative conceptual design solutions irrespective of their level of experience. This research builds on existing research including the Functional Basis, a finite set of terms used to define the desired or existing functionality of a product, a Component Naming Taxonomy that is based on a distinct function-based definition, a Design Repository that houses knowledge of existing consumer product designs, and a computational concept generator. The current research develops and tests a system consisting of concept generation, product design and visualization tools (existing and new) with the goal of improving innovation and creativity in engineering design. To enable development of computational tools for product design using the Functional Basis, Component Naming Taxonomy, and Design Repository, the existing database schema of the Design Repository is modified to introduce new terms like the performance type, metric, etc., which are in turn used to define the concept of component interfaces (Input/Output). A modular product design software is then created based on the definition of Interface, which has additional functionality like working directly with the black box function model of the product, and inherently handling branching and merging. The flexibility of the algorithm is demonstrated with a case study. This modular product design software tool is developed using Integer Programming (IP) formulation to solve the design problem using Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning. Finally to enable better understanding of the output from the computational concept generator, the information about the terms in the Component Naming Taxonomy (also needed for the modular product design software) is collected and presented to the users in the form of open source wiki pages.