Automatic conceptual design using experience-derived heuristics

Conceptual design is considered to be the most difficult phase of engineering design, with success dependent to a great extent on the expertise of the designer. Automation of some aspects of this phase would be of immense practical benefit. It is suggested that the generation of design solutions can be brought about through the application of heuristic knowledge. However, this sort of knowledge is in short supply and has proven difficult to acquire for computer systems. Nevertheless, actual examples of designers' work are more readily available, and the heuristics applied by designers may be considered to be implicit in these examples. The technique of Case-Informed Reasoning has been developed to try to exploit this potential source of knowledge, and applied to the task of fluid power circuit design, a configuration design task. This technique offers a practical approach to conceptual design automation in domains where design knowledge is lacking.