OPTIMAL CONFIGURATION-DESIGN - AN INTEGRATED APPROACH USING GRAMMARS

A computational approach to design that integrates conceptual design, configuration design, and component selection task overcomes some of t he barriers to successful design automation. FFREADA is an implementat ion of a general design generation and optimization algorithm featurin g hierarchical ordering of grammar-based design generation processes a t different levels of abstraction. FFREADA is used to generate near-op timal hand-held drill power trains in a space exceeding 200 million de signs that are not limited to any particular functional architecture o r component configuration. Drill power train designs with valuer withi n 1 percent of the optimal solution are found in minutes by sampling 3 02,000 design states on average. Optimal configurations are found for drill power trains with three different torque requirements.