A hierarchical co-evolutionary approach to conceptual design

Conceptual design is a key early activity of product development. Limited understanding of conceptual design process and lack of quantitative information at this stage of design pose difficulties on effective support for concept generation and evaluation. In this paper, a hierarchical co-evolutionary approach is proposed to support conceptual design. In this approach, higher-level functions are decomposed based on a set of grammar rules, and mappings between functions and their solutions, or means, are realized through a co-evolutionary computing process. The paper describes the details of the approach. An example of designing a mechanical personal transporter is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.