Design Space Analysis with Hyperdimensional Metamodels

该奖项的研究目标是开发能够对产品设计空间进行建模的方法，以便能够识别和开发有前景的地区。每个产品都有一个与设计过程中所做选择相关联的设计空间。通常，这些选择是在有限或不断变化的信息下做出的，因此最终的设计可能不会位于设计空间的最佳区域。通过对设计空间进行建模，可以识别有关设计权衡和技术创新机会的信息，并将其用于改进产品设计。本研究的重点是利用可用数据对设计空间进行精确建模，识别设计空间中包含最有前景的设计的区域，并应用多目标优化技术从这些区域中选择最佳设计。可交付成果包括支持自适应数据收集和处理来自多个来源的数据的算法的开发，表征和识别设计空间中有希望的区域的方法，以及支持多目标优化问题的软件系统中的优化方法的集成。如果成功，这项研究的结果将提供机会，大幅减少设计新产品所需的时间，同时提高使用这些方法开发的产品设计的质量。这些方法将具有足够的通用性，可以应用于广泛的产品设计问题。这项研究的结果将通过专业会议和会议以及通过在学科期刊上发表来广泛传播。预计将与工业合作伙伴合作，在现实世界的问题上评估这些方法，参与该项目的本科生和研究生将受益于他们接触到的新兴设计技术。

The research objective of this award is to develop methods that enable the product design space to be modeled so that promising regions can be identified and developed. Every product has a design space associated with the choices made during design. Often, these choices are made with limited or changing information and thus the resulting design may not lie in the best region of the design space. By modeling the design space, information about design tradeoffs and opportunities for technological innovation can be identified and used to improve the design of the product. This research focuses on the tasks of accurately modeling the design space with available data, recognizing the regions within the design space that contain the most promising designs, and applying multi-objective optimization techniques to select the best designs from these regions. Deliverables include the development of algorithms to support adaptive data collection and the handling of data from multiple sources, methods that characterize and can identify promising regions within the design space, and the integration of optimization methods within a software system that supports multi-objective optimization problems.If successful, the results of this research will provide opportunities to dramatically reduce the time it takes to design a new product while improving the quality of product designs developed with these methods. These methods will be general enough to be applied to a wide range of product design problems. Results from this research will be widely disseminated through professional meetings and conferences and through publication in disciplinary journals. Collaborations with industrial partners to evaluate these methods on real-world problems are anticipated and the undergraduate and graduate students involved in the project will benefit from their exposure to an emerging design technology.