CAPTURING DESIGN INTENT

Abstract
In the highly competitive “market pull” era, designers and manufacturers are working
continuously to achieve three main objectives, for the success of final design solutions. These
objectives are improved customer satisfaction, reduced product development time and
optimized or less product cost. A lot of information (unused knowledge), mostly disorganized,
is available to the designer during the earlier design sages in the form of raw data. Efficient
interpretation and analysis of this raw data is needed to transform the data into useful
information which can be further converted into design knowledge (intent of the designer).
Design intent in this work is defined as “what” useful information can be used by the designer
to generate the next set of solutions. The ‘useful’ information would include preferences of
customers and designers for previous design concepts and design criteria respectively. The
present research develops knowledge representation framework and decision-making
approaches to effectively handle the design information during early design stages, which
represents the intent of the designers. Knowledge-based Engineering (KBE) is used in this
work to automate design process of mechanical engineering parts and assemblies in computer
aided design (CAD) environment. This helps the designers to reuse previously existing design
information and automate the task of repetitive designs. Knowledge Template (KT) CAD
model is developed by using KBE tools, which get automatically configured to specific form
according to customers’ preferences for design requirements. A knowledge representation
(KR) framework is developed by understanding and mimicking a biological phenomenon in
nature called Phylogenetic. This framework represents similarities of specifications among
previously generated design concepts in the form of phylogenetic tree by using Unweighted
Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA) algorithm. The number of design
modifications a designer performs in one concept to evolve the other concept is also
represented in the form of phylogenetic tree by using neighbor joining algorithm. UPGMA
algorithm is modified further to develop two new algorithms i.e. Weighted Selective Pair
Method with Arithmetic mean (WSPMA) and Unweighted Selective Pair Method with
Arithmetic mean (USPMA), which helps the designer to select the most similar previous design
concept sharing similar features with new design concept. Decision-making during concept
evaluation is facilitated by developing an alternate way, where instead of considering cost and
benefit characteristic of the design criteria, it is proposed to incorporate the designers’
preferences in terms of importance of the design criteria. For this purpose, integrated
framework based on rough numbers and Vlsekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno
Resenje (VIKOR) method is developed, which is termed as modified rough VIKOR (MR-
VIKOR). To reduce the ambiguity and uncertainty of design information, bijective soft sets are
used in this work to depict mapping between design specifications (developed from customer
requirements) and generated design concepts. This provides unique parameterization tool to
the designers for concept selection. To improve customer satisfaction and incorporate
customers’ preferences in the new product development (NPD) process, an integrated decision-
making approach based on bijective soft set, Shannon entropy and Technique for Order of
Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is developed for the concept evaluation.
The proposed decision-making approach assesses the customer requirements multiple times to
capture more information during concept evaluation. The collective result of these KR
frameworks, decision-making approaches and KBE tools is to help the new designers to take
better informed decision during new product development process as knowledge regarding the
intent of previous designs is clear. This simplifies the design process and reduces new product
development time.