Supporting design reuse based on integrated design rationale

Most of the engineering design tasks involve design reuse to some degree. Computer services to support design reuse will help to improve the quality and efficiency of the design. Reusing existing design needs to know why and how an artifact is designed as it is. Design rationale is such information. We build an integrated model of design rationale and provide computer services based on that model to support design reuse. Four kinds of services are provided: intelligent information retrieval, demonstration by self-explained simulation, dependency checking by constraint network and decision support by multi-attributes utility theory. The techniques are illustrated using a freight car bogie design example.