Sharing Design Knowledge among Design Group Members by Case-Based Reasoning

Abstract

Engineering design process requires the designers' previous experiences. The designers may be required to modify basic product units as well as install new functions. It is central to creative design that the designs of other designers can be reused. We propose a case-based design support framework to support this process. Our framework is implemented as a prototype system SUPPORT, which interactively supports the design process involving the specification analysis step of making a complete specification table, the functional design step of developing each specification item into a hierarchical function tree through the use of the graphic editor, and the device selection and layout step of realizing the functions. The designers can analogically reuse past designs and/or the pieces of their own and other designers from various viewpoints. To support this reuse, we consider the semantic memory which defines the relations among concepts from the viewpoint of situations in which they are used. At the end of each step, constraint violations are checked. If some constraints are violated, the system and the user interactively try to recover them based on similar violations in the past. After a new design is completed, the functional design is organized into an existing MOPs-like function abstraction hierarchy and can be used as a framework for a new design in the future. We are currently evaluating our framework by applying SUPPORT to the design of elevator control.