Simulation and visualization methods of the rotational contact-impact behavior between two gears are presented. The simulation and visualization programs have been developed. Numerical examples are demonstrated.

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The numerical method for transient structural dynamic and acoustic analyses, and visualization method to listen the acoustic analysis result are presented. A computer program to solve the transient acoustic problem when impact loads are applied has been developed. Numerical examples are demonstrated.

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This paper focuses on application of fluid/structure interaction to tire analysis, such as hydroplaning analysis and prediction of tire traction on snow. Tire deformation is calculated by FEM, and fluid flow is calculated by FVM. Furthermore the fluid/structure interaction between tire and fluid is considered, in which the Lagrangian mesh (tire) and the Eulerian mesh (fluid) are defined independently and their coupling is computed. The complex fluid/structure interaction such as road/tire interaction could be analyzed. Predicted results are in good agreement with experimental data.

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In this paper a new technique, the coupling of modal superposition method and explicit Finite Element Method is introduced for vehicle driving simulation. This coupling technique is applied to the rigid body parts in the vehicle FE model which are not substantially important in the simulation but influence the behavior of another parts which are focused in the analysis. This coupling technique can be used to reduce CPU cost of the simulation maintaining the accuracy of the entire vehicle structure performance.

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CAO (Computer Aided Optimization) has been widely used in development and design process of products in automotive and aerospace industry etc. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to make a system for identifying material properties in a FEM model of human cervical spine with automation and optimization technology by comparing experimental and numerical results.

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In this paper, deal with the optimum design technique for the coupling problem of heat conduction and structure analysis, put different analysis problem into the same optimum design model, use the basis vector method which can control complex 3D shape optimization problem, and develop the special analysis solver for the coupling problem of heat conduction and static structure with same shape (nodal coordinates and element connectivity) data which satisfied special needs of shape optimization. Furthermore, assemble the design sensitivity analysis module, the optimization technique module, etc., and developed the program, which optimize the coupling problem of heat conduction and static structure. Using result of some application examples, it verified the usefulness and the validity of this program.

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A method for improving local optimal solutions of nonlinear programming problems by treating constraints directly, named "Modal Trimming Method, " has been proposed by the authors. This method combines a gradient method for searching local optimal solutions, with an extended Newton-Raphson method based on the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse of a Jacobian matrix for searching initial feasible solutions used for the gradient method. In this paper, the strategy for preventing traps into fathomed local optimal solutions is revised to treat a wide range of problems. The method is applied to three types of test problems-quadratic programming, quadratically constrained, and nonlinear programming ones, and its performance is evaluated in terms of the global optimality of the suboptimal solutions obtained by the method. It turns out that the method has a high possibility of deriving the global optimal solutions by the suboptimal ones for a wide range of problems.

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In this paper, we propose an approach method to solve packing problems of irregular polygons (i. e. the convex and concave polygons). To solve this problem, we use an approach method based on the "artificial shake actions". By giving vibration, the irregular polygons will collide with each other while changing their positions and orientations continually, and by repeating these actions, the allocation space can be shrunk. Due to this unique mechanism, the wastes between the irregular polygons become smaller gradually. Then irregular polygons of different shapes and sizes are packed with high packing density. To obtain effective vibration pattern the parameters of the vibration (i.e. amplitude, angular frequency and initial phase) are tuned by using Evolutionary Programming (EP) technique. In this paper, we carry out some simulation-basis experiments, and examine the applicability of the proposed methodology

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In this paper, we will show the integrated optimization system that is composed by RBF as approximation tool and Genetic Range Genetic Algorithms as optimizer. This system has function of optimizing radius of basis function in optimization, indication of next searching points by using basis function and optimization by using Genetic Range Genetic Algorithms that is a step further of Adaptive Range Genetic Algorithms. All these system is composed in Excel platform, thus, user can used them easily without knowing neither RBF nor GA. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed system, we will show a numerical example that has multi-peak with constraints.

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A commercial spacecraft should survive on orbit for more than 10 years under the severe circumstances without any maintenance. To realize this subject, not only performance but also other design factors such as reliability, mass, robustness, cost, etc. should be taken into consideration. From point of the thermal design, it is very important to obtain the robust thermal control subsystem with matrix heat pipe layout while minimizing the mass (weight). A new thermal optimization method without compromising the thermal robustness and the mass of thermal subsystem is highly anticipated. This paper proposes a robust thermal design approach for optimizing the heat pipe shape to minimize the mass of the spacecraft panel. We apply a combination of Design of Experiments (DOE), Response Surface Methodology (RSM) and Monte Carlo Simulation to determine the robust design parameters that minimize the mass of the heat pipe structure. Dimensions of the heat pipe design parameters were determined with rationally in a short time and practical robust optimization method was established.

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Recently, satellite system is getting more sophisticated and complex in order to meet the high mission requirements. The satellite engineers desire the design support system, by which specialist of structural designers and thermal designers can design concurrently, and by which the specialists can confirm the products to meet the requirements. In this paper, authors suggest a prototype design system for satellite by using XVL technology, which can integrate the design and structural/thermal analysis and which can reduce the capacity of input/output data for structural/thermal analysis.

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The Structural adjustment system for efficient design of mechanical structures has been proposed. This system is based on the Finite Element Sensitivity Analysis (FESA) for coupled problem that is concerned with both heat resistance and thermal stress. A new formulation for this coupled analysis in FESA has been derived. This system has been applied to the design of a diode for an alternator. As a result, it is shown that the fluctuation of responses according to all design parameters is recognized by the one calculation result in this system.

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Applying "software robot" like iSIGHT for simulation based design, analyst and designer can get a lot of simulation results automatically. As the result data are increased in number, it is important to extract valuable information from designer's point of view from them. This paper introduces a post-processing tool on Excel in order to evaluate iSIGHT database file and RSM coefficient data.

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This paper proposes a mini-max type robust optimal design based on design variation hyper sphere and quadratic response surface. In order to enhance the robust optimal design by considering correlative variance and nonlinearity of the objective function and constraints, robust optimality is evaluated by their worst points within a distribution region, and the robust optimization problem is formulated as a mini-max type one. In the computational scheme, the design space is diagonalized and isoparameterized into a hyper sphere and the objective function and constraints are approximated as quadratic polynomials over the region to efficiently obtain the strict extremes by mathematical means within the inner loop of mini-max type optimization computation. The proposed formulation is applied to two numerical examples for ascertaining its validity.

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These days robust and/or reliability design has become more and more important in the products under many kinds of imprecision, including human errors, modeling errors and so on. Reliability design treats imprecision of design variables and parameters that are known before the design process and assure that the failure will never occur within the certain percentage. Then, robust design must treat the problem that treat imprecision of design variables considering the situation of design parameters with and without their imprecision. Considering those conditions, it becomes multi-objective optimization problem. Then, we need to consider how to derive Pareto solutions and how to use it as utility function as design information. In this study, we treat derivation of Pareto solutions using MOGA.

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This study deals with the standardized transformation methods for structural reliability-based design and these evaluations by considering the mathematical approaches of reliability index for its design safety. In practice, several design variables are estimated as random variables according to the failure phenomenon. i.e. normal and/or non-normal distributions. In addition, there are correlations between these random variables. Then, we reconsider evaluation spaces as standardized space throughout some transformation methods. And we investigate some characteristics of limit state functions on various design spaces by using simulation.

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By describing product function and mechanism of failure into Top-Down Oriented Information Model, the authors developed the reliability design management system to analyze reliability of current design, and reflect the action to carry out high reliability into each design stage. In this paper, authors propose the product model that can describe product functions and failure mechanisms on each design stage, and the way to decompose product function and failure mechanism. In this system, product model, the failure model and functional model are represented into same network. By applying the reliability engineering methodologies in this information model, this system can provide the activity of design that can reduce failures or mitigate their effect from conceptual design stage.

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Simultaneous design of multiple products through introducing common modules across them, which is called product variety design etc., has become an essential viewpoint for excellent manufacturing firms. Correspondingly theoretical means for integrating product variety design have been proposed under several standpoints. While synchronous design of multiple products was the first target of research activities, the practice of product variety design is asynchronous and distributed across various players. Thus the research target must be shifted to more complicated circumstances of product variety design. This paper describes a consideration on several topics underlying on the direction. In the discussion, the potential roles of leading design concept and assessment techniques, transformation patterns of customer's value, and distributed design schemes are reviewed toward a picure of future research issues.

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The entire design activity of an engineering system is performed through the integration of distributed partial design problems. A better design solution requires their superior coordination. In general, a design problem is multi-objective, and its optima is defined as a set of Pareto optimal solutions. This means that its final solution cannot be fixed without any outside commitment. Such relationship gives design freedom to each part, and simultaneously acts as outside commitments. This paper proposes an optimization-based method for effectively supporting designers in distributed design process based on Pareto optimality. In the method, the above freedom is modeled as linear convex regions and domains represented with a set of representative points, refinement operation is mathematically formulated over such points. The optimization procedure is implemented with physical programming for efficiently reflecting designer's preference. The proposed method is applied to preliminary airplane design problem to demonstrate its validity.

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A medial surface generation technique has been developed to make a solid thin structure into a shell model for finite element analysis. This method can automatically translate complex assembly models containing contact parts into the analysis data and then reduces working hours for analysis. The availability of the technique is proved by applying it to magnetic disk cover parts.

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As a computer input method without hands, eye motion is a considerable choice. We call it eye gesture and we have developed a computer interaction device in witch a user inputs command by using the eye motion with viewing graphical information on computer display. Since the developed device has a CCD camera to get image of user's eye and a high performance image processor, the device detects both pupil position and eyelid motion at a time. In this paper, the eyelid opening motion is tried to use as a new eye gesture sign. Experimental results show that the eyelid opening motion is a reliable sign to express user's intention but it disturbs the eye pointing motion.

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This paper describes new input devices for wearable computers. An input device for a wearable computer should be light weight, wireless, one-hand operational, and always-on with an appropriate interface software to support efficient input. Six input devices with 3- and 5-degree of freedom (DOF) were fabricated to realize these characteristics. Evaluation experiments were performed, in which a basic focus move in a 2D matrix and a hierarchical file tree was examined. In addition, character input interfaces adfusted for each DOF were investigated in input time and subjective preference. The result revealed that the five-DOF Pen-type device was the fastest and most preferred among the six.

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Collaboration consists mainly of two tasks; one is each partner's task which is done by the individual, the other is communication with each other. In our previous paper, it was indicated that the viewpoint from the back of user's own avatar was useful for smooth communication. From that viewpoint, the user can see not only the behavior of partner's avatar but also that of his own avater and the relationship between them in virtual space. On the other hand, the other viewpoint of avatar's eye utilizes for the individual task. This paper investigates the influence of two changing methods of these viewpoints; one is a button method and the other is a body bending method, on the collaboration support and how to use each viewpoint in collaboration in virtual space. The result indicates that the button method is preferred to body bending method to change th eviewpoint, and that two viewpoints are inclined to use even in shape evaluation situation.

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Physical shape data of sample bones can de collected by a non-contacting type of digitizer. However, stable position of sample bones was not easily obtained during the data collection procedure. Therefore, we have designed and developed a special zig for this sturdy. The paper presents the overview of the 3D bone modeling method with this zig based on a reverse engineering approach. To evaluate the method, a physical prototype was created by 3D printer based on the model, and compared with the original bone sample.

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InterRobot is the speech-driven embodied interaction robot with both functions of speaker and listener. By using InterRobots, this paper develops a speech-driven embodied group communication system in which 4 InteerRobots are entrained one another as one speaker and three listeners for supporting human interaction and communication by generating expressive actions and motions coherently related to speech input. The interaction analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the system. The same system is exhibited in National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation where visitors come across with dynamic experience of embodied communication.

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Uncertainties in design solutions are a function of object complexities. So as to deal with such uncertainties, characterization of each solution space and management of uncertainties are required to reach a solution, where main concerns focused on boundaries of solution spaces. Differences between uncertainties of measurements and uncertainties in design are in the order of data and models, namely, models antedate data corresponding alternatives in design and models postdate data implying reactive explanations for data. This consequent feature in design requires management of shortage of information and/or mixing of different mechanisms due to the inherent attribute of models. Observations on boundaries of solution spaces focusing on structural attributes are summarized to give a starting point for management of uncertainties in design.

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This paper describes the framework and methodology of co-creative artifactual engineering. Firstly, definition of co-creation in the framework is presented, and the research activity in the division of co-creation engineering in RACE (Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering) is shown. Then, the emergent synthesis where emergence is employed as a key concept to synthesize artifactual systems properly is explained. The emergent synthesis is a promiising method to realize co-creation among humans and artifacts. Finally, the co-creative artifactual engineering framework using emergent synthesis methodologies is described. An example of studies in co-creative artifactual engineering, market microstructure based modeling of recycle market, is also given.

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In this paper, we first discuss a methodology for the store and reuse of various types of information including design data. Architectures of such systems will consists of three components; (1) the extraction of information unites and the attachment of attributes; (2) data mining or information filtering; and (3) the customization of stored unites. In these components, we developed a prototype of an information filtering system on the basis of recommender techniques and a star-coordinates type of visualization technique. In this system, all data in database are mapped onto a 2D plane so that their coordinates represent the importance of the data. Control axes defined on the 2D plane can easily control the positions, that is, the importance of data. Our system enables users to recognize the overall tendency of dataset and to control recommendation results intuitively.

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Ageing is inevitable for most of artificial objects, however, proper diagnostics might predict a life time of each component. By replacing each component at a proper timing, we can fully reuse a particular object and realize a very long life time of the object. Based on this concept, diagnostics and measurements are considered for a variety of artifacts.

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Service Engineering is a new engineering idea which aims at increasing service and knowledge contents of added values generated in product life cycle. This report focuses on a service modeling method which is needed in the first step of the Service Engineering. Firstly, we clarify why service should be discussed and argue that intensifying service contents is crucial not only for arriving at environmentally conscious design and manufacturing but also for creating more added values in future advanced societies. Secondly, we present essential concepts of service engineering that is required to intensify service contents. Furthermore, we discuss about subjectivity of service. In general, service is related not only to objective elements but also to the receivers' perception of service contents. In this context, we propose a service modeling method which can represent services with such subjective property of service by clarifying actual service cases.

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This paper describes a new approach to facility layout planning using self-organization. The self-organization method is proposed to generate facility layout plans autonomously according to the material flow which emerges from the local interactions among potential fields generated by production elements. A case study of facility layout planning is presented for semiconductor manufacturing, in which it is difficult to find a proper layout because of large scale of the system and complex process flow. The effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed in the computer simulations by comparing with the current facility layout which is made by human experts in terms of the accumulated traveling distance of products.

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In this paper, the method for describing the functional elements and the technical information through the required functions and the technique of deriving the conceptual forms are proposed. First, the template of "Required Functions", "Required Specification" on geometrical forms and the typical words that represent designers' intention item are classified. Second, the form elements is collected and the relation among the required function, the functional element and the technical information is structured. Finally, by using these relations, the system which supports deriving the conceptual forms by the required functions is developed.

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Authors are constructing a development process with 3D-CAD for customer-specific manufacturing equipments in a production engineering division. This paper presents a methodology that utilizes 3D-CAD for an early design phase of the development process. Considerations show validities of the methodology were verified for a certain manufacturing equipment.

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This paper describes a new web-based engineering system that enables the effective utilization of product design knowledge and tools during engineering product development. The system consists of three subsystems : (1) knowledge database that is virtually integrated by knowledge sharing system, (2) analysis/design tools that is supported by process navigation system, and (3) desktop interface through which designers access and share information and tools. The system is applied to air conditioner design group, elevator design group and pomp system design group, and contributing to improvements in product performance and reductions in design cycle time and cost.

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A CAE system utilizing knowledge and know-how for the support of analytic works has been developed. The present system has two key features. One is the easy and brief system construction in response to several analytic works. The other is guidance of analysis procedure and supports using analysis knowledge. Using the present system, designers can carry out analytic works which have been traditionally done by experts for CAE.

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This paper proposes and attribute dynamic network model (AND-Model) for supporting the emergent integrated modeling and collaboration, which has been the core concept of our hybrid multi-agent architecture (ANetCoDE). In our model, design agent can dynamically join in, stay, or leave the system during the design process. When a design task is allocated, a design network among agents can emerge from the system. To support the evolving nature of design in a distributed collaborative engineering context, we present a plug-and-play concept for propagating the local design networks towards the global perspective. With the help of this functionality, a local designer could share the knowledge, information or models from the different domains, via remote agents plugged into his/her local domain. Also, the recursive nature of collaborative design process and how the proposed model functions well in the recursive design process are described. Finally, a planar robot arm design problem is illustrated using the proposed framework.

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A various of industrial technologies and skills have flown to industries of many Asians countries from Japan. In Japan, these phenomena have been continued. To break these situations, new improved processes in industries should be considered. When industrial parts are ordered to produce to supply from makers, he not only manufacture productions according to an order table, but also should design and supply produces added to improved characteristics. In this paper, a new developmental process called "A Smart Compact Laboratory" proposes based on these considerations, in which analyzed lead to design at the initial design stage, and through out manufacturing system. The new design process applies a king ping part in designing and making prototype mode of solar car in our laboratory shown as example. As a result, additional development process and a smart compact laboratory system would help Japanese manufacture.

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Recent dismal economic conditions and a ruthlessly competitive environment have forced many companies to restructure or reorganize their priorities. For such companies, the concentration of various resources upon their particular strong points has become one of their main strategies. Consequently, there has been a rapid increase in the importance of 1) selecting profitable projects from a wealth of possible alternatives and 2) optimizing the allocation of current resources among the selected projects. This paper proposes an optimization system for project selection that not only yields the most beneficial project set, but also the optimum allocation of human resources for the selected projects. The optimization system consists of two algorithms, namely 1) a project selection algorithm for choosing the set of projects that maximizes the total estimated profit and 2) a human resource allocation algorithm for optimally placing human resources among the selected projects, having considered the satisfaction rate provided by the required skills, personal motivation and employee career plans.

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Collaborative product design implies that multiple designers will cooperate during the design of a product, by sharing knowledge and information. For practical design teams, expertise in a wide area is needed, but the area that a single designer can proficiently handle is usually quite narrow. Therefore, facilitated collaboration is indispensable to achieve efficient results from a practical design team. In recent years, customer requirements have become increasingly diversified, and companies have focused upon developing unique or increasingly sophisticated products to maintain their market share. As a result, achieving especially creative designs has become more important than ever. An additional aim of collaboration is to maximally assist this type of creative design process. This paper discusses an advanced collaborative system supporting creative design processes that depend on interactive communication among a number of designers. To implement such a system, this paper proposes several methods : a collaborative communication procedure that enables designers to create new ideas more effectively, an analytical technique for uncovering "seed" ideas that may become important as the design project evolves, and the necessary support system to apply these techniques to practical designs.

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In this paper, the authors propose a constructing method of FEA modeling knowledge classes based on the design pattern style, for applying the knowledge classes to the training support system. By using the design pattern technology, the prototype support system and its training knowledge can be arranged and classified in several patterns as a framework for training support system. The prototype system has been developed with WEB database. As the scenario of training subject, the strength of beam material was picked up here. For analyzing the stress or deformation of a beam structure that has a notched part, the instruction scenario divided in several stages has been implemented in our proposed system.

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