Design Information Handling in a Knowledge Based Intelligent Design System

The advancements in internet technology have had a tremendous impact on the development of knowledge-based engineering systems that support concurrent engineering. Not only the conventional knowledge acquisition and representation techniques need to be improved to adapt the new situation, but the information retrieval and distribution have arisen to be new questions to answer. This article addresses these issues of management and handling of knowledge in a knowledge-based intelligent design system. A search algorithm based on the computation of a similarity index is proposed to retrieve a design case from the project library. An initial design report is used to distribute design information so that the information such as a designer’s intent which cannot be included in a standard CAD file, can be retained. In addition, a simple constraint definition frame is presented to define the relationships between critical design parameters, and two information representation schemas, information matrix and constraint tree, are described. The presented research efforts in this article aim to provide promising tools to harness the full potential of ontologies in knowledge management within an intelligent design system.