Engineering Commons^™

A Computational Theory For The Generation Of Solutions During Early Conceptual Design, Cari R. Bryant

Doctoral Dissertations

"Advancement in technology is usually made by building on previous experiences and learning from past successes and failures. However, knowledge transfer in the broad field of product design is often difficult to accomplish. Research has shown that successful component configurations, observed from existing products, can be dissected and stored for reuse; but few computational tools exist to assist designers during the conceptual phase of design. Many well-known manual methods (e.g. brainstorming, intrinsic and extrinsic searches, and morphological analysis) rely heavily on individual bias and experience and are often time intensive, laborious tasks that may not catch solutions that are functionally …