Abstract
Conceptual design is the generation process of a candidate architecture that satisfies given requirements through generation of function structure, search for working principles and elaboration of the principles. This design phase plays an important role to develop a product in a short term, and therefor it has been strongly desired to develop computer support technology for this phase. There have been numerous works on computer support of conceptual design and a lot of discussion has been performed. Those works presuppose that requirements for the product have been defined clearly. However, it is actually hard to define and describe customers' requirements accurately. Therefore, the initial requirements input to conceptual design phase are ambiguous, and are corrected and detalied in the conceptual design phase. This paper describes an approach for generating function structure with correcting and detailing requirements. In this approach, a functions is described by a verb and a noun (an object), and a function structure is modeled by a tree. A noun is a function can be detailed by using a database of objects and those relations. A verb in a function expresses state transitions of a real object which are necessary to satisfy the function. Therefore, by using a database of state transitions involving by a verb, ambiguous requirements can be corrected in the process of function decomposition. By implementing those databases and interfaces for interactive design between the designer and the customer, it is possible to realize computer support of conceptual design considering ambiguity of requirements.
