Using Parameterized Pareto Sets to Model Design Concepts

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Malak ◽  
Christiaan J. J. Paredis
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Pareto Set ◽  
Design Concept ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Specific Design ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Pareto Sets ◽  
The Many

Decisions made during conceptual design can have a major impact on the success of a design project, and designers must take care to select a concept that leads to a desirable design solution. However, the inherently imprecise nature of design concepts complicates decision making. A single concept relates to a large set of specific design implementations, each of which has a different level of desirability based on the tradeoffs designers are willing to make. Thus, designers must consider tradeoffs across the many possible implementations of a design concept in order to decide between concepts rigorously. To accomplish this efficiently, designers require an abstract understanding of the characteristics of a design concept. In this paper, we describe an approach to modeling design concepts that is based on an extension of the notion of a Pareto set, called a parameterized Pareto set. Using this construct, designers can generate a model based on information about prior implementations of a design concept in a way that includes tradeoff information while being independent of implementation details and reusable for different design problems. We demonstrate the approach on the conceptual design of a gearbox. The example involves two different design scenarios that serve to demonstrate the reusability of the model and effectiveness of the overall approach.

Machine Learning-Based Design Concept Evaluation

2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Camburn ◽  
Yuejun He ◽  
Sujithra Raviselvam ◽  
Jianxi Luo ◽  
Kristin Wood
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Technology Development ◽  
Empirical Evaluation ◽  
Learning Technologies ◽  
Design Concept ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Automated Method ◽  
Concept Evaluation

Abstract In order to develop novel solutions for complex systems and in increasingly competitive markets, it may be advantageous to generate large numbers of design concepts and then to identify the most novel and valuable ideas. However, it can be difficult to process, review, and assess thousands of design concepts. Based on this need, we develop and demonstrate an automated method for design concept assessment. In the method, machine learning technologies are first applied to extract ontological data from design concepts. Then, a filtering strategy and quantitative metrics are introduced that enable creativity rating based on the ontological data. This method is tested empirically. Design concepts are crowd-generated for a variety of actual industry design problems/opportunities. Over 4000 design concepts were generated by humans for assessment. Empirical evaluation assesses: (1) correspondence of the automated ratings with human creativity ratings; (2) whether concepts selected using the method are highly scored by another set of crowd raters; and finally (3) if high scoring designs have a positive correlation or relationship to industrial technology development. The method provides a possible avenue to rate design concepts deterministically. A highlight is that a subset of designs selected automatically out of a large set of candidates was scored higher than a subset selected by humans when evaluated by a set of third-party raters. The results hint at bias in human design concept selection and encourage further study in this topic.

Exploiting Critical Path Method for Evaluation of Conceptual Design

2010 ◽  
Vol 97-101 ◽  
pp. 4429-4432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mei Yan Wang ◽  
Lian Guan Shen ◽  
Yi Min Deng
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Critical Path ◽  
Design Concept ◽  
Design Evaluation ◽  
Critical Path Method ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Critical Design ◽  
Concept Evaluation ◽  
Design Requirements

Conceptual design is a critical design phase during which initial design solutions, called design concepts, are developed. These design concepts must be evaluated to ensure they satisfy the specified design requirements and the most appropriate design concept must be selected. It is often difficult for the designer, especially for the novice, to make an appropriate design concept evaluation and selection. Existing work on design evaluation lacks an effective tool for evaluating the temporal performance of the design concepts. To address this problem, a Critical Path Method (CPM) from project management is adapted for design evaluation, whereby a CPM network is converted from a causal behavioral process (CBP) and the methodologies relating to CPM are also applied to design improvement. A case study of a lever-clamp assembly system is also presented to illustrate as well as validate the method.

AN EXTENDED SUBSTRUCTURING TECHNIQUE FOR EFFICIENT EVALUATION OF NONLINEAR LOAD-BEARING STRUCTURES IN THE CONCEPTUAL DESIGN STAGE

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (06) ◽  
pp. 1350086 ◽  
Author(s):  
MLADENKO KAJTAZ ◽  
ALEKSANDAR SUBIC ◽  
MONIR TAKLA
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Element Analysis ◽  
Nonlinear Load ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
Conceptual Design Stage ◽  
Nonlinear Structural ◽  
The Finite Element Analysis

The research presented in this paper has extended the substructuring technique into the nonlinear domain in order to apply the finite element analysis (FEA) method to complex nonlinear structural design problems in the conceptual design stage. As conventional FE models based on substructures allow only linear analysis, it was necessary in this research to introduce a new algorithm capable of linearizing nonlinear structural problems with sufficient accuracy in order to enable evaluation of engineering design concepts in a more objective and rigorous manner in the early stages of design. The developed method was implemented within a commercial FE solver, and validated using a select number of case studies. The results obtained for the two sample solutions indicate that the new method has achieved an improvement in accuracy of 90% and 98% respectively compared to the conventional FE-based approach applied to the same class of design problems.

An I-Ching-TRIZ-Inspired Approach to Design Concept Generation

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duc Truong Pham ◽  
Huimin Liu
Keyword(s):  
Design Concept ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
I Ching ◽  
Innovative Design ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Aircraft Cabin ◽  
Design Specifications ◽  
Design Solutions

This paper presents a new approach to producing innovative design concepts. The proposed approach involves extending the inventive principles of TRIZ by integrating other TRIZ and TRIZ-inspired tools. The set of inventive principles is then structured according to a framework adapted from I-Ching and represented using TRIZ’s Behaviour-Entity (BE) formalism to which constraints have also been added. The adoption of the BE representation enables a reduction in the amount of repeated information in the inventive principles. A BE pair contains information on a design solution. A Behaviour-Entity-Constraint (BEC) triple additionally has information on constraints on the solution. The BEC representation thus facilitates the retrieval and generation of design solutions from design specifications. The paper uses the problem of laying out seats in an aircraft cabin to illustrate advantages of the proposed approach.

Explicit Evaluation of Design Readiness for Student Refinement of Conceptual Design

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenji Iino ◽  
Masayuki Nakao
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Mechanical Engineering ◽  
Design Concept ◽  
Graduate Schools ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Detail Design ◽  
Explicit Evaluation ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

Abstract Students at three graduate schools of mechanical engineering and adult groups in Japan have been taking conceptual design courses the authors teach. Among the three graduate schools, the 24 hour course, at the University of Tokyo, spread over 13 classes during 4 months, takes the students all the way from identifying their design goals, generating ideas, refining their designs, to building prototypes. The adult course students also spend long hours of building prototypes. Despite strong encouragement by the instructors for detail design, the students often leave their design concepts at rough stages without refining their ideas to the detail level needed for prototype building. Building a prototype from a design concept that is not fully expanded often results in efforts that lead to failure and retrial. Such back and forth between concepts and physical trial is unavoidable in design, however, if possible they better be kept at the minimum. The instructors, in their efforts to better motivate students to refine the designs, developed a metric “Level of Readiness (LOR) index” for evaluating how refined a design is. Students are better motivated to reach higher scores and this index that evaluate the quality of their designs, in terms of how detail they are, in numbers serves as a better incentive for the students than words from the instructors.

Integrated Optimization for Supporting Functional and Layout Designs During Conceptual Design Phase

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masakazu Kobayashi ◽  
Yuya Suzuki ◽  
Masatake Higashi
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Layout Optimization ◽  
Optimization Techniques ◽  
Design Concept ◽  
Functional Structure ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
Functional Optimization ◽  
Integrated Optimization ◽  
Design Object ◽  
Target Design

This paper proposes a new integrated optimization of a functional structure and a components layout for supporting a conceptual design. A conceptual design is the second phase of a product development, where designers build up the functional structure and the components layout of the target design object as the design concept. However, a functional design and a layout design are very different tasks, there is a lot of flexibility for decision makings during them and its solution space is vast. Therefore, it is extremely difficult for designers to build up an optimal design concept by considering various design requirements themselves. To overcome this limitation, this paper develops a new design method based on optimization techniques. This method consists of two optimizations, a functional optimization and a layout optimization, and obtains the optimal solutions by cooperatively executing two optimizations. Specifically, a functional optimization based on a GA is the main part of the proposed method and executed just one time whereas a layout optimization is executed to calculate the layout with minimum area (or volume) for each design solution for each iteration during the process of the functional optimization and the result is used as one of its valuation characteristics. Using the proposed method, designers can simultaneously obtain both the functional structure and the components layout of the target design object that satisfies performance, cost and area at a high level. To demonstrate the flow of the proposed method and confirm its effectiveness, this paper describes the case study, where internal devices of a personal computer are designed using the proposed method.

Concept-to-Value: Method and Tool for Value Creation in Conceptual Design

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ndrianarilala Rianantsoa ◽  
Bernard Yannou ◽  
Romaric Redon
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Value Creation ◽  
Production Model ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
A Value ◽  
Innovation Project ◽  
Design Objects ◽  
Value Model

This paper is dealing with the problem of steering the conceptual design by value. Indeed, the preliminary phase of the design process, which generates the innovative concepts that will be developed in detail, already defines broadly the created value of an innovation project. Contrarily to the detailed design that consists in design solutions refinement for well defined performances increase, the conceptual design is characterized by the fact that the design objects, like the design problems, the design concepts and knowledge, are not frozen, known or precised, and have to be defined progressively in a value creation way for customers and stakeholders. Since there are few works on this issue, we try then to suggest a conceptual design process based on the capture and evaluation of the generated intermediate objects for the maximization of the created value of this phase, and so of an innovative project. A descriptive model, a value model and a prescriptive production model of the intermediate objects are thus built and explained.

Using Parameterized Pareto Sets to Model Design Concepts

2010 ◽  
Vol 132 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Malak ◽  
Christiaan J. J. Paredis
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Problem ◽  
System Level ◽  
Model Design ◽  
Pareto Dominance ◽  
Component Level ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Decision Attributes ◽  
Pareto Sets ◽  
Dominance Criterion

The decisions designers make during conceptual design can have a large impact on the success of a project. Conceptual design decisions can be challenging because the imprecise nature of design concepts make them difficult to model. Prior literature exists on using Pareto sets to model design concepts abstractly in the space of decision attributes. However, this approach has limitations when the concept under consideration is a component of a larger system. The need to relate component-level decision attributes to system-level decision objectives can lead to a violation of the assumptions underlying classical Pareto dominance. The main contribution of this article is a new dominance criterion, called parameterized Pareto dominance, which is applicable in such situations. It is a generalization of the classical dominance rule and is found to be sound from a decision-theoretic perspective. A secondary contribution is the articulation of a generalized methodology for constructing concept models based on classical or parameterized Pareto sets using either observational or model-generated data. The modeling procedure, including the new dominance criterion, is demonstrated on observational data about hydraulic cylinders. The question of whether a parameterized Pareto set can be an adequate representation of a component-level design concept is evaluated on a gearbox conceptual design problem for which the component-level decision is subordinate to system-level vehicle design problem.

Assessment of Conceptual Design Problems Comprising Design Rationale and Sketches

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumbul Khan ◽  
Khushbu Maheshwary ◽  
Ryan Arlitt ◽  
Lucienne Blessing
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Evaluation Process ◽  
Design Rationale ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Design Decisions ◽  
Design Assessment ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Design Program ◽  
Post Hoc ◽  
Reduced Time

Abstract Conventional forms of design assessment are time consuming for instructors. Crowdsourced assessment of students’ design concepts raises the need of efficient rubrics that facilitate novices to score similar to experts, in reduced time. We investigate rubrics in the context of conceptual design problems, that comprise open-ended questions, requiring students to express their design concepts and supporting rationale using text and sketches. We conducted exploratory post-hoc analysis on assessment data collected by instructors of a Design program at a Singaporean secondary school. Our results suggest that integrated rubrics — that consider both text and sketch component together — are better suited for the assessment of conceptual design problems, than task-specific rubrics, that consider textual and sketch components separately. Evidence from both novice assessors as well as experts suggests that the articulation of design rationale using text is crucial for the assessment of conceptual design problems as it provides assessors input into why design decisions were taken, thus aiding in the evaluation process. Our insights are relevant for developing frameworks that employ crowdsourcing for the assessment of conceptual design problems.

Multi-Objective Design Problem of Tire Wear and Visualization of Its Pareto Solutions2

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 170-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Koishi ◽  
Z. Shida
Keyword(s):  
Inverse Problems ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Objective Functions ◽  
Pareto Solutions ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Multi Objective ◽  
Design Engineers ◽  
Design Variables

Abstract Since tires carry out many functions and many of them have tradeoffs, it is important to find the combination of design variables that satisfy well-balanced performance in conceptual design stage. To find a good design of tires is to solve the multi-objective design problems, i.e., inverse problems. However, due to the lack of suitable solution techniques, such problems are converted into a single-objective optimization problem before being solved. Therefore, it is difficult to find the Pareto solutions of multi-objective design problems of tires. Recently, multi-objective evolutionary algorithms have become popular in many fields to find the Pareto solutions. In this paper, we propose a design procedure to solve multi-objective design problems as the comprehensive solver of inverse problems. At first, a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) is employed to find the Pareto solutions of tire performance, which are in multi-dimensional space of objective functions. Response surface method is also used to evaluate objective functions in the optimization process and can reduce CPU time dramatically. In addition, a self-organizing map (SOM) proposed by Kohonen is used to map Pareto solutions from high-dimensional objective space onto two-dimensional space. Using SOM, design engineers see easily the Pareto solutions of tire performance and can find suitable design plans. The SOM can be considered as an inverse function that defines the relation between Pareto solutions and design variables. To demonstrate the procedure, tire tread design is conducted. The objective of design is to improve uneven wear and wear life for both the front tire and the rear tire of a passenger car. Wear performance is evaluated by finite element analysis (FEA). Response surface is obtained by the design of experiments and FEA. Using both MOGA and SOM, we obtain a map of Pareto solutions. We can find suitable design plans that satisfy well-balanced performance on the map called “multi-performance map.” It helps tire design engineers to make their decision in conceptual design stage.

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