A Structured Synthesis Strategy for Mechanical Devices

良好的机械设计通常由高度集成、紧密耦合的部件组成，其中部件之间的相互作用对设计的功能和经济执行至关重要。这一断言与其他工程领域的设计方法背道而驰，例如软件设计和电路设计，它们提倡每个组件以最小的交互实现单一功能的设计。由于机械部件的几何形状、重量和成本，将单个功能需求转换为单个组件通常是不切实际和不可行的。每个组件可能对多个功能的性能有贡献，而每个功能的性能可能分布在许多组件上。事实上，大多数机械部件不仅执行期望的功能，而且还执行许多额外的，意想不到的功能。在良好的机械设计中，这些附加功能经常被利用。提出了一种将系统功能需求转化为可实现物理系统描述的机械设计形式化方法。它是这样一种假设：通过对一组有限的机械设计的功能进行形式化描述，并对物理部件进行相应的描述，就可以生成一个利用其部件的多种功能的物理系统的描述。

Good mechanical designs are often composed of highly- integrated, tightly-coupled components where the interactions among the components are essential to the function and economic execution of the design. This assertion runs counter to design methodologies in other engineering fields, such as software design and circuit design, that advocate designs in which each component fulfills a single function with minimal interaction. Because of the geometry, weight, and cost of mechanical components, converting a single functional requirement into a single component is often both impractical and infeasible. Each component may contribute to the performance of more than one function, and the performance of each function may be distributed over many components. In fact, most mechanical components perform not only the desired function, but also many additional, unintended functions. In good mechanical designs, these additional functions often are exploited. A formal methodology for mechanical design for transforming the system functional requirements into a description of a realizable physical system is proposed. It is the hypothesis that, by creating a formal description of the function of a limited set of mechanical designs and a corresponding description of physical components, a description of a physical system that takes advantage of the multiple functions of its components can be generated.