Various activities during the course of an engineering design project can be divided into two categories. The first set of activities are the actual design activities which involve carrying out various synthesis and analysis tasks. The second set of activities are support activities that involve project management, selecting tools and people, deciding organization, defining interfaces etc. In a complex design project, the time spent in carrying out support activities is a large fraction of the overall design time. As design projects get much more complex the time spent on carrying out the support activities increases rapidly.
Currently, the time it takes to build a Collaborative Design System is a large fraction of the overall project time.
Our goal is to achieve an order of magnitude reduction in the time and effort to compose a collaborative design system.
Projects:
Many products are designed in a modular fashion. This allows them to be adapted to the requirements of a specific usage scenario. "Configuration Design" addresses the problem of composing the optimal product configuration for a given usage scenario. We have developed a novel agent-based approach to solving the configuration design problem. The approach is based on a genetic algorithm for which the modification and evaluation operations are implemented as autonomous asynchronous agents. Specific design knowledge about the configuration design problem at hand can be included in the agents, resulting in a significant reduction of the size of the design space and of the cost of evaluating candidate designs. Furthermore, thanks to their autonomous and asynchronous nature, these agents can be easily executed distributedly on a network of workstations. The power of this novel agent-based approach has been demonstrated for the design of modular robot manipulators.
Project Contact: Chris Paredis
The use of physical prototypes for design verification is a very costly and time-consuming process. As a result, there is a trend towards design verification and analysis in virtual, simulated environments. However, creating simulations for complex electro-mechanical systems can be quite a challenging task itself. SIMKIT is a software environment which facilitates creating simulations of mechatronic systems. It allows the designer to update and refine simulations throughout the design process, from the conceptual design to the final detailed design.
Project Contact: Chris Paredis
Designing complex electro-mechanical systems is a complicated problem because of the competing requirements for tight packing and assemblability. In current design practice, designers ofter use physical mock-ups to verify whether assemblability constraints are satisfied. The goal of IAMS is to avoid this expensive and time-consuming process by facilitating assemblability checking in a virtual, simulated environment. In addition to part_part interference checking, the IAMS tool will check for tool accessibility, stability, and ergonomics.
Project Contact: Pradeep K. Khosla
The Spatial Layout problem is an instance of Configuration Design. The goal is to locate a set of objects in a housing unit while satisfying various constraints. In addition to the requirement that the objects do not overlap, we consider connectivity constraints (e.g., cost of wiring and piping connections), separation constraints (e.g., for temperature or electro-magnetic sensitive objects), and accessibility constraints (e.g., access to high maintenance objects).
Project Contact: Chris Paredis