A Knowledge-Based Conceptual Design Support System

Conceptual design process is considered as the most critical and important phase of product design process. It is the stage where product's fundamental features are determined, large proportion of the lifecycle cost of the product is committed, and other major decisions are made, which have significant impact on the downstream design and related manufacturing processes. It is also a knowledge intensive process where diverse knowledge and several years of experience are put together to design quality and cost effective products. Unfortunately, computer support systems for this phase are lagging behind compared to the currently available commercial computer aided design (CAD) tools for the later stage of design. This paper proposes a knowledge-based conceptual design support system in which design concepts from existing products and previous experiences are captured and used to design future products. The conceptual design support system will assist designers during the conceptual design process by generating concepts on a morphology chart and handling some of the repetitive tasks. In addition, the generated concepts may inspire designers to generate new concepts. The design support system addresses the key features of conceptual design process such as functional analysis, concept generation and concept evaluation with aid of the production rules within the knowledge-based system.