The performance enhancement and the size reduction of the electric equipment cause the elevation of power density. These subjects make the thermal design difficult for mechanical designers, and increase importance of high efficiency and precision design method. For example, a heatsink that is used in a base station of communication devices is required to be low cost and light weight. Because the weight of heatsink occupies most of the weight of base station. Usually, a thermal designer selects a regular pitch straight fin as a low cost, easy designable and optimizeable. This paper describes a new light weight heatsink optimization method to use irregular pitch fin. In our method, heatsink section is divides to some areas at the beginning. Secondarily, fin-base-thickness and fin-pitch etc was optimized at each areas by using GA(Genetic Algorithm) or SA (Simulated Annearing) method. As a result, an irregular pitch fin heatsink weight is lower than that of a regular pith fin heatsink about 20% by using this method.

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The approach for application of optimization technologies has been chiefly cultivated in a research and an analytical field up to now. Recently, the demand that applies it to the design field is rising rapidly. However, the optimization tool should acquire some expertise and how to operate it because it is generally multifunctional. Therefore, it has not arrived to spread enough to designers. Then, we are developing the design-supporting tool that reflects the optimization know-how that our company has accumulated by using Microsoft Excel as a user interface. This paper explains the outline, the background and the case examples.

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The optimization computer-aided design by efficient parameter calculation was developed. This computer-aided design consists of a preprocessor, a real-time monitor tool, and a post processor. Each parameter calculation is executed in parallel using a single computer in the PC clusters. As this computer-aided design allows designers to customize their own computing code into the system and there is no need to re-write the code for parallelization, designers can use the computer-aided design without difficulty.

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This paper proposes self-maintenance module which has self-maintenance function, using the model-based reasoning technology based on qualitative physics and is independent of object machine system. This paper aims at realization of self-maintenance module as module type equipment, in order to add to a common object machine system. In order to realize this, this paper proposes dividing reasoning mechanism and reasoning by cooperation of two or more modules. This realizes the high system configuration of extendibility despite the diversity of object machine systems. Furthermore this paper proposes the design support system for self-maintenance module which supports designing the self-maintenance system composed of self-maintenance modules, and makes it optimal for each object machine system, in consideration of processing efficiency of the system, cost to realize this system, and reliability of this system itself, to the diversity of the object scale which changes with object machine systems.

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In this paper, a "flow model" expressing the flow of service contents and service channels is newly introduced into service modeling which the authors have proposed. Here, service is regarded as a conversion operator of contents, and expression of the dynamic feature. Multiplex structure of service can be represented by a sequence of services. The "flow model" clarifies the difference between the whole structure and its partial structure called "scope" and "view", and specifies the relation between contents and channels. A basic simulation is programmed by STELLA according to this model in order to design services and to evaluate them.

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Since previous designer may already generate possible combination of existing domain knowledge, it is difficult to design creative solution without creating innovative knowledge. We have already confirmed that combination of existing knowledge from different domain may useful for this process by analyzing design cases. In this paper, we propose methodology to generate hypothetical knowledge for creative design by combining existing knowledge.

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The concept of stepwise modular design, which is synchronized the progress of design process by using of the structure of the graph of a product model, has already proposed in 1st report. This 2nd report is based on the previous and developed from two viewpoints; one is the information of Interface model in a graph-described product model, and the other is information processing in stepwise refinement of Interface. In this report, the concept of the priority between the each Interface is introduced and the priority is described explicitly as the information in Interface. Then this priority information is available for stepwise modular breakdown considering the design intension from the upper layer to the lower layer. And the prototype system based on this concept has been implemented and some examples are shown.

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The importance of environmental protection is frequently noted because of the occurrence of environmental problems, such as waste and air pollution. For example, the reduction of CO_2 emissions was discussed at the Kyoto Conference. As a result, the necessity for the realization of products that perform better environmentally has been emphasized. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been proposed as a method of grasping the environmental load, occurring especially in product manufacturing, in order to design and manufacture products with better environmental performance. LCA is a technique for computing the environmental load of a product over the total product life cycle by performing inventory analysis of each life cycle process and summing up the results. However, since LCA computes environmental load based on a static database, it is difficult to consider dynamic changes of a life cycle in its calculation, for example, the timing of the reused parts, the time change of the environmental load, and unevenness of the products and process. In this research, we propose the new environmental load evaluation system, which can consider dynamic changes of each life cycle process by connecting external calculating modules to the LCA system.

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A schema is proposed to support mechanical parts through their life cycle using network agents called Part agents. They follow the corresponding part via network and supervise its state. RFID attached to the real part is used as its identification and a short memory. Based on the deterioration data stored and the maintenance information gathered via network, Part agent evaluates the cost and environmental impact if the part is used and if the part is replaced. It proposes an appropriate maintenance based on the evaluation. On the replacement, it selects the part with less predicted environment impact.

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This paper describes a simulation-based approach for estimating the effects of component selection in maintenance system design. In this study a maintenance system is modeled with data acquisition and data processing for execution of maintenance processes. Data acquisition is mainly executed by inspection process and monitoring. Decisions for process execution are described with simple rules for evaluating product state and performance. The effects of accuracy of sensors and combinations of decision rules are examined. Assumed product degradation due to use and behavior of a maintenance system are simulated and quality management is evaluated based on the result of the simulation.

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In order to design of manufacturing systems, new concepts are proposed in this report. First concept is the stepwise refinement process and information model of manufacturing system. Second concept is the master model that is the core of integrated manufacturing systems including several application systems. This master model is combined with the concept of the stepwise refinement process and information model. Then this information master model is described which is useful to simulate and to evaluate the planed production system according to design processes. This report shows the prototype system for the design environment for a production system, which has several functions for integration closely with a commercial line simulator, a scheduler, and an optimization module.

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When developing manufacturing equipments, the methodology that 2D/3D-CAD is used in is effective in a conceptual design phase. However, the more expression of design become complicatedly, the more works to revise drawings takes time in this methodology. And oversights sometimes occur, because of complexity. This paper presents the methodology that 2D/3D-CAD is utilized with the restriction to solve above-mention's problems, and report results applied the methodology to an actual development.

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Recently, the product design technology with CAD and CAE is widely applied to many products. However, useful knowledge contained in the digital data was not positively reused. In order to shorten the development time of the similar products in the large assembly systems, it is especially important to establish the standardizing design process and reuse the design knowledge. Therefore, we have developed two effective approaches to improve the thermal design for large assembly products with reusable analysis models. First approach is to define the hierarchical model tree and modular division. Second is to standardize the data configuration and the modeling process in the design team. As a result of applying this method to a commercial satellite, we verified that profit and loss point was appeared at the time of three or four products developed. And the development time per a satellite was shortened by 30% at the case of 40% reuse rate using proposed Modeling For Reuse (MFR).

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In recent years, 3D-CAD system has been rapidly improved. However, the principal improvements are focused on the shape modeling and operativeness, so that it is still remained solved how to treat the design information and the intention generated within the design process. It is important for 3D CAD to become means of more widely used information transmission and to support the designer to detailed design with design information and intention which was considered in the conceptual design. In this paper, we discuss the integrated model of the geometric model and the design information. In order to support the detailed design phase, the transmission architecture of the design information and the intention is also proposed through typical examples when design changes

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A graph-theory based software has been prototyped to decompose a large-scale plant design problem represented as a bipartite graph of design conditions to be met and design specifications, and to derive inter-dependencies of the decomposed sub-problems. This software has been validated by application to a simplified model of the prototype fast breeder reactor (FBR)"Monju". The main purpose of this research is to take over engineering knowledge obtained in design, construction, operation and maintenance of "Monju", in order for future constructions of FBRs. The function of this software is focused on inter-relations of each specific engineering judgment whether the target condition is satisfied by relevant specifications.

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One of the issues that designers face during a conceptual design phase is to get hold of a variety of complex information, which emerges during the design task. This paper presents an approach to support designers in understanding such information including design rationale during and after the conceptual design process. I suggest a representational model, and present a design method to help designers externalize and structure design information based on the model. I have developed the CD-Scenery system based on the method, and conducted a user study to validate the underlying method.

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The integrity of products over families and generations has become an essential factor toward manufacturing success in today's matured and globalized marketplace. Product architecture governs the deployment of such products by defining diverse characteristics of different products, shared or deviated functional mechanisms, commonalized or specialized manufacturing methods and process, etc. This paper views such product architecture as the chained structures of products under various view points, i.e., customers' needs, function, manufacturing modularity, and their relationships between the various structures, discusses the issues of products modeling toward developing a knowledge management system for product architecture design, and shows the outline of its implementation.

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We propose the mechanism representation using the function description and building blocks with qualitative relationship. A function description is defined as the functional feature of a physical object, and the physical object is represented by one abstracted building block. A mechanism, which designers have derived from a function, is represented as changing the size of these blocks and/or arranging them. The relationship between blocks, which represent the mechanism including a designers' intention, is described with spatial and temporal relationships. We also develop the pilot system for supporting the conceptual design process with proposed representation method, and show feasibility of the system.

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This paper discusses the optimal design of common components used for a class of products. Simultaneously designing multiple products has become an important concept in manufacturing in these days. Consequently, simultaneously designing a set of components becomes to have another meaning beyond ones in the past. This paper formulates the design problem of common components behind the design problem of multiple products as an optimization problem, and investigates the condition of optimal design through the tradeoff among the level of system-level performance, the number of different components, etc. Then, the situation on the optimality and tradeoff structure of common components is demonstrated by using a tentatively-configured optimal design method through a design problem of liftgate dumpers for passenger cars.

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This paper briefly reports the questionnaire survey on the utilization of various methods and tools in the product development process of Japanese manufacturing industries. After its background and purpose are described, the result is discussed on their recognition and usage, the relationships with promotion activities, types of industry, organizational structure, and product development cycle, etc. Further, the gotten result is partially compared with the preceding studies in United Kingdom, New Zealand and Sweden to reveal the underling mechanism in promotion of product development methods and tools.

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This paper shows the latest technology trend and a case of CAO (Computer Aides Optimization) software iSIGHT. Automation, Integration and Optimization are three key functions of iSIGHT. Engineers can make their design process great effective using these three functions. Robust optimal design is also a key function of iSIGHT. It has reliability optimization method, Taguchi robust design method and DFSS (Design For Six Sigma). DFSS minimizes a mean value and a sigma (standard deviation) of an objective function satisfying constraints that aren't violated even if they range in specified sigma level. Multi objective optimization function is reinforced at the latest iSIGHT. NCGA and NSGA-II that are based on genetic algorithm and STA (Satisfied Trade-off Analysis) are involved into iSIGHT.

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Defining similarity between design concept drawings according to their contents enables case-based design aid, such as retrieval of drawings relevant to a designer's current design problem or extraction of sharable design knowledge by classifying accumulated drawings. In this study, we analyze design concept drawings and formalize geometry associated with physical quantities (e.g., an arrow with 'Pa' representing pressure application) as a 'behavior line', which is not defined in conventional drawing standards. Then we propose a general and objective definition of similarity among design concept drawings based on physical quantities and geometry to cover a wide range of engineering design cases across different designers, products, domains and organizations. The methods of retrieving and classifying design concept drawings using the defined similarity are proposed and applied to some example drawings.

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In design of products especially for public use such as automobile, and PC, the requirements become widely spread. Thus, we should have to estimate products by using multi-objective optimization, and it should be estimated in scalar value. In such cases, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) works very well. In this study, we analyze the growth of frontier of products and try to estimate the future requirements for the product design. In order to demonstrate the proposed method, we apply it to the growth of Japanese Car for eight years. From those results, we show the growth the frontier for specific class of cars, and also we show the shifts of requirements by shifts of frontier for other specific class of car. And also the necessary condition for product designs is evaluated from the management-side. The above also considers feedback in a conceptual design stage.

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The Semantic Web technology has acquired attentions as a platform for knowledge management recently. We apply the Semantic Web to knowledge management of ship basic design, where variety of design knowledge is needed to be processed. Firstly, authors conduct domain analysis to basic design for clarifying a sequence of tasks and design knowledge that is referred in each task. Secondly, ontologies, part of Semantic Web technologies, are build along with the analysis and written in RDFS and DAML+OIL. By using the proposing system, the relevant design knowledge.

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The environment where Japanese industry has been paid with respect is changing tremendously due to the globalization of economics, where Asian countries are undergoing economical and technical development as well as advancing in information technology. With acceleration of manufacturing bases relocating abroad, industrial hollowing out is happening; hence effort to transfer the technology and the design knowledge of machine design in a company is becoming an important subject. For example, in the design of custom casing product, a designer who is lack of casting knowledge may not be able to produce a good design. In order to obtain a good design and manufacturing, it is necessary to equip the designer and manufacturer with a support system related to casting design or so called, knowledge transfer and creation system. This paper proposes a new computer-aided system for casing design, which is composed of the explicit and tacit knowledge transfer system using synchronised multimedia and the knowledge internalization system using immersive virtual environment. This system indicates that our proposed method is useful as a knowledge transfer and creation method for casting design.

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This paper proposes a new design system for assembly quality evaluation called AREM. It is based on the assembly fault occurrence model reflecting both product design and assembly shops. It prevents assembly faults related to the product design. The distinctive features of the method are estimation of fault occurrence caused by design and extraction of faulty parts or operations. AREM can distinguish the responsibility of the design and the shop quantitatively. This method is mainly applied to various kinds of small-size products mainly such as home appliances, and has proven to be effective. In this paper technical issues in application of AREM to heavy equipments are discussed.

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Our objective is to apply a new technology development method, called "a Smart Compact Laboratory" to design optically shear tools for electronic parts. The method is proposed by one of authors. In order to design optimal configuration of shear tool, fracture mode of actual tool are firstly investigated by a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). From these studies, boundary conditions and/or restraint conditions are taken. According to this method, optimal configuration of tools are obtained.

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This paper describes problems which are created in development process of semi-custom product, and a new concept of information management named FlexPIM (flexible and collaborative process information management) which takes a load off one's task about negotiation with sections at changing product specification. FlexPIM-system is described with information management structure and two types of information distribution.

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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 a method for structurizing and visualizing communication processes.

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The performance enhancement and the size reduction of the digital consumer products cause the elevation of packaging density. These subjects make the packaging design difficult for mechanical designers, and new design optimal solutions are needed without compromising the size, weight and performance. Although 3D-CAD and CAE become a part of engineer's daily routine in recently, effective integrity interface between the virtual design tool and real humanistic collaboration process is the most important key to accomplish the innovative synthesis. This paper proposes a new Japanese collaboration approach "Middle-up-down design method". Also this method is outlined through an application for MITSUBISHI ultra-slim notebook PC "Pedion" development. As of September 1997,"Pedion" was the world's thinnest at 18mm thick among A4-size notebook for Windows and performance effectiveness of our middle-up-down design method was proved for innovative synthesis.

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To meet strong requirements on communication tools in our daily lives, several services are currently available to support multi-media communication via he Internet. Although those services are convenient and some of the requirements are satisfied, such a system as would share the 3D shape contents in an interactive manner has not been reported so far. This paper presents a collaborative communication tool called FLAVA system, which makes it possible to communicate each other while participants perform shape manipulation on the shared objects in an interactive manner. The paper describes the basic system architecture and primitive modules of FLAVA system, and presents the idea of voice communication module to support shape manipulation in a collaborative work. The paper also covers implementation issues of the module.

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Studies on mobile robots to support our daily lives are very active, and several approaches are reported. We are developing an autonomous mobile robot named TRACY3 for human following behavior using infrared light tracing approach. Our goal is that TRACY3 be always behind its human master and plays a role of a friend, a servant, or a mechanical pet. Control mechanism of TRACY3 is based on direction control with LED sensor and speed control with ultrasonic sensor. The LED sensor detects infrared light coming out from the IR device attached to the waist of human body. The paper presents the basic control mechanism of TRACY3,and shows the result of tracing experiments.

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This paper proposes a real-time dynamic interface DO-IT (deformable object as input tool) for intuitive 3-D plastic geometric operation. When a user bends, presses and twists a real deformable object as an input tool, its 3-D deformation is electrically measure and applied to a virtual control volume on a computer display. Then the deformation of the control volume is mapped to an objective shape model on the display using free-form deformation algorithm. With this interface, a user can three-dimensionally deform a shape model on a display intuitively with passive hap tic feedback of the reaction of the input tool. The authors previously implemented this interface concept with an elastic input tool made of electrically conductive foam rubber. Although our software can maintain the deformed shape on the model in a display, the elastic input tool itself-returns to the original shape when a user releases it. The difference between the shape of the model and that of the tool sometimes spoils intuitiveness. To solve such problems, a plastic input tool made of electrically conductive clay is designed and fabricated. Its efficacy and feasibility are examined through basic experiments and prototype system performance.

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This study develops a dialogue model and a command interpretation technique for service robots to obtain interactively the necessary information of actions for the tasks requested from users. A request from users sometimes misses some data necessary to complete the requested task because a voice command is usually requested depending on context and situation. The developed command interpretation technique first divides a command into words. Then, it analyzes the content of the command paying attention to the verb used and object included. If there are some missing data in the command, it sequentially generates queries to obtain them. The applicability of the dialogue model and the technique is demonstrated by dialogue experiments using a robot arm system.

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Vehicles performance design is taken up for the theme, and this research shows the new design technique that it is provided the design territory. The design territory is the range of the value of the design parameter which realizes the value which the characteristic value should fill. The combination of the design parameter which can get the ideal characteristic value is shown by using Hierarchical Cluster Analysis and Ward distance. A designer can choose design space by showing more than one territory. It considers that consequently creative design becomes possible.

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Flutter is destructive self-excited oscillation, which occurs when wind power is infused into aeronautical/industrial structures such as aircrafts and suspension bridges. Flapping power generator is a system which extracts wind energy from it. Recently, Isogai et al. proposed a new system. In his system, wing is supported elastically in heaving oscillation while the pitching oscillation of the whole wing is mechanically driven by an electric motor with a prescribed frequency and pitch amplitude. This system is governed by six non-dimensional parameters. In his study, these design parameters were optimized to maximize power efficiency by using "Complex Method". This paper considers multi-objective optimization of Isogai's "Flapping Wing Power Generator". In this study, objective functions are efficiency and power. To obtain a wide variety of Pareto solutions efficiently, one of Evolutionary Algorithms, Adaptive Neighboring Search (ANS), has been extended for the present optimization. In result we obtained unique tradeoff from the non-dominated solutions and solutions as good as by "Complex Method".

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In the present paper, the optimum design method of composite plate wings for aeroelastic characteristics is examined. First, the minimum weight design using real-coded genetic algorithm is treated. Lamination parameters are used as design variables in this optimization procedure. Next, the active flutter suppression using piezoelectric actuators/sensors is treated. PVDF films are used as a modal transducer for identifying specific modes in vibration measurement, and PZT actuators are used as actuators of flutter suppression. The validity of these design approaches is examined through the numerical examples.

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The wing shape of booster stage for Two-Stage-To-Orbit Reusable Launch Vehicle is optimized in consideration of supersonic region, transonic cruise and subsonic landing. Navier-Stokes computation is used for aerodynamic evaluation because transonic cruise and subsonic landing have flow condition that vorticity dominants. ARMOGA is used for aerodynamic optimization problem with four objective functions because it is expected that tradeoff can be obtained using low individual numbers. The results show the relationship of each objective functions.

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In order to quickly obtain qualitative designs, First Order Analysis (FOA) is proposed. The basic ideas include (1) graphic interfaces, (2) use of sophisticated formulations based on the theory of mechanics of material, (3) the topology optimization method. The key idea of topology optimization is based on the ground structure approach and the minimization of the mean compliance in order to maximize the global structural stiffness. To realize the above idea, we make the topology optimization tool using beam element. In this tool, ground structure is easily constructed as if to pile building blocks. The min-max approach is employed to deal with multi-objective problems. The design variables are updated using the sensitivities by CONLIN (Convex Linearization). Some examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of this method.

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A new method for crashworthiness optimization of vehicle structures is presented, where an early design exploration is done by the optimization of an "equivalent" mechanism approximating a vehicle structure. An equivalent mechanism is a network of imaginary beams joined by prismatic and revolute joints with special nonlinear springs. These springs are designed to mimic the force-displacement characteristics of thin-walled beams subject to axial crash and transversal bending. A number of finite element (FE) models of beams with typical cross sections and wall thicknesses are analyzed to build a surrogate model that maps a property of nonlinear spring to the corresponding FE model. Using the surrogate model, an equivalent mechanism is optimized for given design objectives by selecting the properties of the nonlinear springs among the values that can be realized by an FE model. After the optimization, the component FE models corresponding to the optimal spring properties are "assembled" into a FE model of an entire structure, which is further tuned to final design. A case study with a vehicle frontal frame demonstrates that the new approach can obtain a better design with less computational resources than our previous best result.

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