Perspective Model for Design Support System

Abstract

With the increasing diversity of demands based on personal preferences for a variety of products, the conventional design procedures using series of consecutive operations are becoming inadequate to supply designs which satisfy personal preferences, and to produce what consumers are really demanding. As one solution, concurrent engineering proposes to make a design under simultaneous collaboration with what the design is going to produce to consider personal preferences. Our approach to this problem is to build a design support system with a graphical user interface (GUI) having a browsing function. Since a user observes a design object from a layered viewpoint, we propose a perspective model that supports the view. To implement the perspective model on GUI and enable browsing for a design, a new idea of Hypergraph is proposed. This paper describes the perspective model, the Hypergraph model and the prototype system HYDRA.