Although the promotion of use of reused parts is desired, high quality requested for parts reduces the opportunity of their practical use. We are proposing network agents that acquire both the quality information of products existing in the market and the consumer's demands on product performances. The agents can promote an effective reuse of parts by matching the parts having distributed quality with various consumer demands and by advising consumers to replace their part with the matched part in the market. In this paper, a life cycle simulation of parts with agents show the variety of consumer preferences for use of parts helps the reuse of parts with distributed quality.

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Emergence is a fact that a population of local agents obeying simple behavior rule(s) emerges a complex global structure, which is not predictable from the rule(s). Nowadays a number of phenomena among physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, sociology and engineering are perceived as results of the emergence. In the context of engineering design, property of the emergence is often referred to linking with design synthesis. In this paper, and application of the emergence to mechanical simulation is discussed. Generally mechanical simulations (eg. FEM, FDM, FVM, BEM and so on) work with well-posed problems and ill-posed problems are eliminated from its application scopes legitimately. In early design stages, however, design problems are often described incompletely and have contradictory properties. Consequently, corresponding simulation problems should be ill-posed. On the other hand, simulation has been expected to apply these early design stages for decades. The authors indicate that introduction of emergence property to simulation scheme enhances its capability and it enables dealing with ill-posed problems. First, a simulation system based on emergence property is defined and its accuracy is compared with FEM in a well-posed problem. Next, behavior of the emergence system is discussed in an ill-posed problem. Finally, open issues and related future works are briefly mentioned as a conclusion.

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Attractive products are changed significantly by requirement definition and conceptual design phase. Quality of product concept, which is result of these phases, depends heavily on creativity of designer ore development team. Therefore, it is difficulty that computer-aided system supports a creative and inventive thinking process, to search a creative design solution. To overcome its difficulty, we developed the synthesis approach which combined the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and the Particles Method of Unified Structured Inventive Thinking (USIT) for supporting to top-down thinking in problem solving process, and confirmed the validity of this approach. In this paper, to improve the mechanical function database, we introduce Pahl & Bietz's system approaches, and a new combination of function is generated by this approach automatically. The validity of this approach is discussed via the case problem.

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We introduced the differentiation phenomenon seen in a morphogenesis of organism into the system for deriving diverse solutions, and proposed the algorithm that enables the generation of form including fibrous form with a different material property as well the existing form element. In this study, to aim at control of evaluation indexes (filling rate, straight chain rate and orientation rate) for generated forms, new three parameters(limit value of fiber-bud element, apical dominance and polarity) were introduced into this system. As a result, the increase of evaluation index values by these parameters was confirmed. And the possibility that evaluation indexes are able to be controlled by operating these parameters was indicated.

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The self-organizing emergence widely occurs in nature, which enables organisms to survive in diverse environments. Through the course of evolution, organisms have adapted to various environments with emergent abilities, that is, the organisms have diverse forms even existing in the same environment such as forests and deep waters. Since such emergent design process has yet to be fully understood, the design method that introduces the feature of emergence must have a great potentiality for developing diverse design solutions. This study introduces a previously reported emergent design method into a dynamic behavior design of mass system. First we design 2-D mass systems by using a cellular automation based on two important characteristics of morphogenesis of organisms. Then with numerical analysis, we confirm the diversity of their behavior against the same kinetic stimuli.

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In this study, we review the history of Christopher Alexander's works and point out why his approaches did not work as he intended. In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", since he proposed the generating system of forms based on mathematical formal systems, forms generated by the system were merely the sum of the parts, and, in Pattern Language, there was no mechanism which ensures the generated whole was actually 'good' one. After these reviews, we searched for domains where Alexander has not explored, and found out he never tried to implement the system that has rules of tendency of behaviors (or forces, in his terminologies). We indicate that this approach has possibility for the design of diversity.

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