The A-Design approach to managing automated design synthesis

Abstract.

This paper presents an approach to managing the complexities of design synthesis techniques. Often computational approaches model design as a search process or as an optimization problem. The nature of such techniques, however, does not allow the user to interact with the search process once it has begun. Furthermore, traditional computational search lacks the ability to learn from experience. While computational search techniques have the ability to search many design alternatives quickly, the human engineer can often arrive at a more elegant and robust solution by applying heuristics learned from past experiences. The method introduced here improves the capabilities of design synthesis methods by allowing for user input and by making decisions based on previous experience. In studying past candidate designs the process learns to be more effective in searching for solutions. Results show how such a technique improves the quality of designs and efficiency of an existing search process.