Engineering Research Equipment Grant: Design Fusion

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The goal of this project is to generate theories and techniques for a computer-based system that will assist in creating mechanical designs that meet their function, cost, and quality requirements while simultaneously meeting the constraints imposed by downstream activities. The principal investigators will create a design system that fuses the functional requirements of a mechanical design with the constraints that are imposed on the design throughout its life-cycle through the use of perspectives and features. This project is founded on three underlying concepts: (1) integrating life-cycle concerns through the use of views from multiple perspectives, where each perspective represents a different life-cycle concern such as manufacture, distribution, maintenance, etc.; (2) representing the design space at different levels of abstraction and granularity through the use of features, where features are the attributes that characterize a design from the viewpoint of any perspective; and (3) generating and pruning the design space through the use of constraints. Design fusion is the unifying concept that integrates these three. Fundamentally, design fusion combines heuristic search and constraint directed reasoning with a robust representation based on features so that life-cycle knowledge can be used to generate, constrain, and test design decisions.