On Engineering Design Generation with XML-based Knowledge-Enhanced Grammars

One of the major bottlenecks in conceptual engineering design is the pure amount of design information which the design engineer needs to take into consideration. Furthermore, the design information available is heterogeneous and consists of information about the design object behavior (i.e. the physics), its intended geometrical form and composition (i.e. the geometry) and miscellaneous other information pieces concerning manufacturing cost and more. Despite the current transition in industry from former engineering drafting by hand to computer-aided design (CAD) software tools in 2D or 3D, even for the most evident information aspects in conceptual design, i.e. the geometry and physics of the design object, the information processing chains of these two aspects of the early conceptual design effort is still not homogeneously supported by modern information technologies. One of the major reasons for the missing links in the automation of design information processing is the lack of a unified design representation combining the geometrical and physical information about the design object. This work explores some of the aspects of engineering design generation with XML-based knowledge-enhanced grammars and tries to identify the relative advantages and disadvantages of this automatic design generation technology.