Abstract
In recent years, conceptual design support has been greatly increasing its importance. One major issue of this conceptual design support is assistance of function structure generation. This process is carried out depending strongly on designer's implicit knowledge which is hard to be visualized. Therefore, methodology for support of this process is difficult to be developed. However, proper function structure backed indirectly by such implicit knowledge might be generated by utilizing common features among previous products which are also based on the knowledge. From this point of view, this paper proposes a generation method of proper function structures using similarity evaluation among function decomposition trees of previous products and taking advantage of sub-functions and their structures which are adopted frequently in them.
