Techniques for machine condition monitoring and diagnostics are gaining acceptance in various industrial sectors. They have proved to be effective in predictive or proactive maintenance and quality control. Along with the fast development of computer and sensing technologies, sensors are being increasingly used to monitor machine status. In recent years, the fusion of multisensor data has been applied to diagnose machine faults. In this study, multisensors are used to collect signals of rotating imbalance vibration of a test rig. The characteristic features of each vibration signal are extracted with an auto-regressive (AR) model. Data fusion is then implemented with a Cascade-Correlation (CC) neural network. The results clearly show that multisensor data-fusion-based diagnostics outperforms the single sensor diagnostics with statistical significance.

This paper presents a review of CBD and its application to building design in particular. Case-based design is the application of case-based reasoning to the design process. Design maps well to case-based reasoning because designers use parts of previous design solutions in developing new design solutions. This paper identifies problems of case representation, retrieval, adaptation, presentation, and case-based maintenance along with creativity, legal, and ethical issues that need to be addressed by CBD systems. It provides a comprehensive review of CBD systems developed for building design and provides a detailed comparison of the CBD systems reviewed.

Conceptual design is a vital part of the design process during which designers first envision new ideas and then synthesize them into physical configurations that meet certain design specifications. In this research, a suite of computational tools is developed that assists the designers in performing this nontrivial task of navigating the design space for creating conceptual design solutions. The methodology is based on automating the function-based synthesis paradigm by combining various computational methods. Accordingly, three nested search algorithms are developed and integrated to capture different design decisions at various stages of conceptual design. The implemented system provides a method for automatically generating novel alternative solutions to real design problems. The application of the approach to the design of an electromechanical device shows the method's range of capabilities and how it serves as a comparison to human conceptual design generation and as a tool suite to complement the skills of a designer.

This paper presents a study of how the use of product configurators affects business processes of engineering-oriented companies. A literature study shows that only a minor part of product configuration research deals with the effects of product configuration, and that the ones that do are mostly vague when reporting the effects of configurator projects. Only six cases were identified, which provide estimates of the actual size of lead time reduction achieved from product configurators. To broaden this knowledge, this paper presents the results of a study of 14 companies concerning the impact of product configurators on business processes related to the creation of quotes and detailed product specifications. The study documents impressive results of the application of configurator technology. For example, in the data retrieved the use of configurators was estimated to have implied up to a 99.9% reduction of the quotation lead time with an average estimated reduction of 85.5%.

Engineering design reviews, which take place at predetermined phases of the product development process, are fundamental elements for the evaluation and control of engineering activities. These meetings are also acknowledged as unique opportunities for all the parties involved to share information about the product and related engineering processes. For product development teams, the knowledge generated during a design review is not as secondary as it may seem; key design decisions, design experiences, and associated rationale are frequently made explicit. Useful work has been carried out on the design review process itself, but little work has been undertaken about the detailed content of the meeting activity; it is argued that understanding the transactions that take place during a meeting is critical to building an effective knowledge-oriented recording strategy. To this effect, an extensive research program based on case studies in the aerospace engineering domain has been carried out. The work reported in this paper focuses on a set of tools and methods developed to characterize and analyze in depth the transactions observed during a number of case studies. The first methodology developed, the transcript coding scheme, uses an intelligent segmentation of meeting discourse transcriptions. The second approach, which bypasses the time consuming transcribing operation, is based on a meeting capture template developed to enable a meeting observer to record the transactions as the meeting takes place. A third method, the information mapping technique, has also been developed to interpret the case study data in terms of decisions, actions, rationale, and lessons learned, effectively generating qualitative measures of the information lost in the formal records of design reviews. Overall, the results generated by the set of tools presented in this paper have fostered a practical strategy for the knowledge intensive capture of the contents of design reviews. The concluding remarks also discuss possible enhancements to the meeting analysis tools presented in this paper and future work aimed at the development of a computer supported capture software for design reviews.

There are growing efforts to mine public and common-sense semantic network databases for engineering design ideation stimuli. However, there is still a lack of design ideation aids based on semantic network databases that are specialized in engineering or technology-based knowledge. In this study, we present a new methodology of using the Technology Semantic Network (TechNet) to stimulate idea generation in engineering design. The core of the methodology is to guide the inference of new technical concepts in the white space surrounding a focal design domain according to their semantic distance in the large TechNet, for potential syntheses into new design ideas. We demonstrate the effectiveness in general, and use strategies and ideation outcome implications of the methodology via a case study of flying car design idea generation.

Currently available computer-aided design tools provide strong support for the later stages of product development processes where the structure and shape of the design have been fixed. Support for earlier stages of product development, when both the structure and shape of the design are still fluid, demands conceptual design tools that support designers' ways of thinking and working, and enhance creativity, for example, by offering design alternatives, difficult or not, possible without the use of such tools. The potential of spatial grammars as a technology to support such design tools has been demonstrated through experimental research prototypes since the 1970s. In this paper, we provide a review of recent spatial grammar implementations, which were presented in the Design Computing and Cognition 2010 workshop on which this paper is based, in the light of requirements for conceptual design tools and identify future research directions in both research and design education.

The paper describes a set of seven fundamental principles for achieving “best concurrency and simultaneity.” The concurrent approach is gaining worldwide attention at this moment. The paralleling of life-cycle activities and process restructuring are being deemed necessary by more and more industries. An automobile product development process example is used in this paper to illustrate many aspects of these seven principles. The principles help the concurrent teams, first, to define how to decompose the product, process and work activities and then, how to arrange these decomposed activities so that “best concurrency and simultaneity” can be achieved.

Product definition is widely accepted as one of the key factors to be considered in the early stage of product design and development. It has a direct impact on the success of a new product in the marketplace. Frequently, product definition is solicited through the voice of the customer (VoC). As such, an organization will obtain a prominent competitive edge over its competitors if it is able to effectively capture the genuine VoC or the requirements of a customer. Sorting techniques provide a means to elicit customer requirements. Although a number of sorting techniques were developed, few of them are able to handle the uncertainty and imprecision inherited from the VoC and subjective judgment because of their crisp decision making. An integrated approach is described, which is based on repeated single-criterion sorts and fuzzy evaluation, for the elicitation of customer requirements. The details of the integrated approach are presented. The approach is validated using a case study on the design of a wooden golf-club head. The details of the validation are discussed.

Arguing that design is a social process, we expand the meaning of modeling and analysis to include all activities facilitating continual refinement and criticism of the design requirements, process and solutions. We do not assume any a priori methods for modeling or analysis; rather, we provide a framework and an approach to study designers and give them whatever modeling and analysis capabilities they choose. Our approach is the basis for a support tool, n–dim, currently under development.

In the design process, different problem statements result in different problem-solving strategies. A proper problem statement is the key to effective problem-solving. Based on the characteristics of the product design process, we divided design problem statements into open-ended (OE), decision-making (DM), and constrained (CO) statements and attempted to investigate the influences of different problem statements on designers’ cognitive behaviors from three perspectives, namely divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and mental workload. Then we provided quantification description to these influences based on electroencephalography (EEG) technology. We conducted experiments on 19 participants and used the BrainProduct™ actiChamp-32 to record the EEG data. Results are as follows: (1) The higher task-related α power was found in the temporal and occipital regions in the OE task compared with that in the DM and CO tasks. The OE statement also would help designers get novel ideas by strengthening their divergent thinking. (2) In the DM and CO tasks, there was no significant difference in the impact of the brain region on convergent thinking, but activities in the left hemisphere were stronger than that in the right hemisphere. The DM and CO tasks have better performance in convergent thinking than the OE task. (3) In the CO task, the designer's mental workload is the highest and mainly related to the activation of the centroparietal and occipital regions. These findings help designers understand the design problem-solving process from the perspective of cognitive science and monitor their thinking modes in the design process so as to improve their design performance.

Gestures play an important role in communication. They support the listener, who is trying to understand the speaker. However, they also support the speaker by facilitating the conceptualization and verbalization of messages and reducing cognitive load. Gestures thus play an important role in collaboration and also in problem-solving tasks. In human–computer interaction, gestures are also used to facilitate communication with digital applications, because their expressive nature can enable less constraining and more intuitive digital interactions than conventional user interfaces. Although gesture research in the social sciences typically considers empty-handed gestures, digital gesture interactions often make use of hand-held objects or touch surfaces to capture gestures that would be difficult to track in free space. In most cases, the physical objects used to make these gestures serve primarily as a means of sensing or input. In contrast, tangible interaction makes use of physical objects as embodiments of digital information. The physical objects in a tangible interface thus serve as representations as well as controls for the digital information they are associated with. Building on this concept, gesture interaction has the potential to make use of the physical properties of hand-held objects to enhance or change the functionality of the gestures made. In this paper, we look at the design opportunities that arise at the intersection of gesture and tangible interaction. We believe that gesturing while holding physical artifacts opens up a new interaction design space for collaborative digital applications that is largely unexplored. We provide a survey of gesture interaction work as it relates to tangible and touch interaction. Based on this survey, we define the design space of tangible gesture interaction as the use of physical devices for facilitating, supporting, enhancing, or tracking gestures people make for digital interaction purposes, and outline the design opportunities in this space.

We believe that case-based reasoning (CBR) will prove applicable to design, at least in part, as we have seen designers making extensive use of past cases. Construction of useful systems, however, requires the resolution of many open issues. In this paper we consider three issues in particular: (1) What sort of content should be captured in a design case? (2) How should the content of a complex case be segmented into chunks for use? (3) How should the resulting chunks be indexed for retrieval? These are among the issues we are seeking to address through construction of Archie-II, a case-based aid for conceptual design in architecture. In addition to our approaches to these issues, this paper also discusses our strategic choice to build a design aiding system as opposed to a system that generates designs on its own.

Function structures are used during conceptual engineering design to transform the customer requirements into specific functional tasks. Although they are usually constructed from a well-understood black-box description of an artifact, there is no clear approach or formal set of rules that guide the creation of function structures. To remedy the unclear formation of such structures and to provide the potential for automated reasoning of such structures, a graph grammar is developed and implemented. The grammar can be used by a designer to explore various solutions to a conceptual design problem. Furthermore, the grammar aids in disseminating engineering functional information and in teaching the function structure concept to untrained engineers. Thirty products are examined as a basis for developing the grammar rules, and the rules are implemented in an interactive user environment. Experiments with student engineers and with the automated creation of function structures validate the effectiveness of the grammar rules.

This paper explores the relationship between the quality of a sketch and how others perceive the creativity of the idea portrayed by the sketch. In this study, sketch quality is characterized through its line work, perspective, and proportions. Four different toaster ideas were each sketched by four people with different backgrounds and levels of sketching proficiency. Then, 360 reviewers ranked the toasters for idea creativity, referring to a set of four sketches: one sketch for each toaster concept. The level of sketch quality for each toaster concept was varied among one of four quality levels. Higher quality idea sketches were found to correlate with higher creativity rank (p > 0.005), and lower quality sketches correlated with a lower creativity rank (p > 0.0005). A toaster idea portrayed with the highest quality level of sketch was 2.3 times more likely to be ranked as the most creative idea within the given set of idea sketches. The results underscore the importance of how an idea is presented, and support the need for sketching instruction in engineering and design curriculum.

As designs exist to satisfy some purpose or function, knowledge of functionality is essential in a wide variety of designrelated activities, including generation and modification of designs, comparison, evaluation and selection of designs, and explanation, diagnosis or repair of designs. Functional modelling refers to a wide variety of approaches to model a design and its requirements from its functional aspects so as to allow reasoning about its functionality for various activities such as the above.

Construction cost estimators are confronted with the challenging task of estimating the cost of constructing one of a kind facilities. They must first recognize the design conditions of the facility design that are important (i.e., incur a cost) and then determine how the design conditions affect the cost of construction. Current product models of facility designs explicitly represent components, attributes of components, and relationships between components. These designer-focused product models do not represent many of the cost-driving features of building product models, such as penetrations and component similarity. Previous research efforts identify many of the different features that affect construction costs, but they do not provide a formal and general way for practitioners to represent the features they care about according to their preferences. This paper presents the formal ontology we developed to represent construction knowledge about the cost-driving features of building product models. The ontology formalizes three classes of features, defines the attributes and functions of each feature type, and represents the relationships between the features explicitly. The descriptive semantics of the model allow estimators to represent their varied preferences for naming features, specifying features that result from component intersections and the similarity of components, and grouping features that affect a specific construction domain. A software prototype that implements the ontology enables estimators to transform designer-focused product models into estimator-focused, feature-based product models. Our tests show that estimators are able to generate and maintain cost estimates more accurately, consistently, and expeditiously with feature-based product models than with industry standard product models.

Case-based design promises important advantages over rule-based design systems. However, the actual implementation of the paradigm poses many problems which put the advantages into question. In our work on CADRE, a case-based building design system, we have encountered seven fundamental problems which we think are common to most case-based design systems. We describe the problems and the ways we either solved or worked around them in the CADRE system. This leads us to conclusions about the general applicability of case-based reasoning to building design.

The central objective of the present author's research is to develop a system supporting the design of a technological process (a computer-aided process planning system) that functions similarly to a human expert in the field in question. The use of neural networks makes the creation of such a system possible. The proposed method uses a system of three blocks of neural networks, and involves the creation of neural networks to be used for the selection of machines, tools, and machining parameters. These networks are built for each process operation separately; that is, a set of neural networks is created for each selection. For the construction of models, different types of neural networks (multilayer networks with error backpropagation, radial basis function, and Kohonen) with different structures were employed, and the networks that made the best selections were identified. A method was also developed for the elimination of defects occurring during the production process. When a defect comes to light, this method suggests changes to the technological process, thus improving the quality of that process. Guidelines for the elimination of defects are produced in the form of decision rules. Such a computer-aided process planning system will be especially useful for process engineers who do not yet have sufficient experience in the design of technological processes, or who have only recently joined a particular manufacturing enterprise and are not fully familiar with its machines and other means of production (tools and instrumentation). It should be emphasized that such a system performs an advisory role, and it is always the process engineer who makes the final decision. The neural network models were tested on real data from an enterprise. A computer-aided process planning system based on rules and neural network models enables the intelligent design of technological processes.

This paper presents a preliminary comparison between the role of computer-aided design (CAD) and sketching in engineering through a case study of a senior design project and interviews with industry and academia. The design team consisted of four senior level mechanical engineering students each with less than 1 year of professional experience are observed while completing an industry sponsored mechanical engineering capstone design project across a 17 week semester. Factors investigated include what CAD tools are used, when in the design process they are implemented, the justification for their use from the students' perspectives, the actual knowledge gained from their use, the impact on the final designed artifact, and the contributions of any sketches generated. At each design step, comparisons are made between CAD and sketching. The students implemented CAD tools at the onset of the project, generally failing to realize gains in design efficiency or effectiveness in the early conceptual phases of the design process. As the design became more concrete, the team was able to recognize clear gains in both efficiency and effectiveness through the use of computer assisted design programs. This study is augmented by interviews with novice and experienced industry users and academic instructors to align the trends observed in the case study with industry practice and educational emphasis. A disconnect in the perceived capability of CAD tools was found between novice and experienced user groups. Opinions on the importance of sketching skills differed between novice educators and novice industry professionals, suggesting that there is a change of opinion as to the importance of sketching formed when recent graduates transition from academia to industry. The results suggest that there is a need to emphasize the importance of sketching and a deeper understanding as to the true utility of CAD tools at each stage of the design process.