DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTELLIGENT PRODUCT DESIGN SYSTEM - INTEGRATION STRATEGIES

Conventional computer-aided design (CAD) packages have drastically red uced the workload of the human designer and shortened the product desi gn cycle. However, the degree of effort and volume of information requ ired to use these tools limit their use to the later stages of design. Intelligent computer-aided design (ICAD) systems have sought to provi de a more complete design tool to assist the designer in all phases of design. ICAD systems incorporate conventional CAD elements as well as knowledge engineering constructs. The level of integration between di fferent components of an ICAD system determines its usefulness. Most c ommercial intelligent CAD packages are tied to a specific set of CAD t ools, restricting their application domains. This dependence on specif ic software tools can be reduced by using general purpose modules to i nterface with available CAD packages. This paper discusses a method of introducing knowledge engineering technology to help develop an advan ced intelligent product design system by integrating ICAD's Concept Mo deller with SDRC's I-DEAS package for engineering product design. This integration is necessary because neither the Concept Modeller nor the I-DEAS package provides any unified design environment where users ca n access both symbolic and numerical design tools as needed to carry o ut design synthesis and analysis activities. Interfacing engineering d esign and knowledge processing together is not an easy task. The task is further complicated since it needs to be done only by those who hav e enough knowledge of both technologies, and also because it may resul t in reorganization of the traditional design process altogether. The proposed intelligent product design system uses artificial intelligenc e techniques to take care of human expert's knowledge and it advocates the use of several commercial software packages that come from a vari ety of sources (and are proven to be robust) to perform design synthes is in a cost-efficient and timely manner The technique described here is relatively easy to implement and is well suited to industrial needs .