Plan-Based Derivation of General Functional Structures in Product Design
This addresses a crucial step in product design for engineers, but it appears incremental as it adapts existing planning methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of decomposing overall product functions into smaller, interacting functions for computer-supported design tools by proposing a new approach that defines this as a planning problem, using logic-based solvers and engineering function libraries, and evaluates it with two application examples to ensure transferability.
In product design, a decomposition of the overall product function into a set of smaller, interacting functions is usually considered a crucial first step for any computer-supported design tool. Here, we propose a new approach for the decomposition of functions especially suited for later solutions based on Artificial Intelligence. The presented approach defines the decomposition problem in terms of a planning problem--a well established field in Artificial Intelligence. For the planning problem, logic-based solvers can be used to find solutions that compute a useful function structure for the design process. Well-known function libraries from engineering are used as atomic planning steps. The algorithms are evaluated using two different application examples to ensure the transferability of a general function decomposition.