Mass Customisation of Creative Designs

Among a nation’s goals are competitive leadership in the international marketplace and excellence in industrial productivity. Superior design, a fundamental prerequisite for superior products and systems, is one of the keys for achieving these goals. Computer aids to design (computer-aided design) have the potential to unlock this key. Whilst the early work on computer-aided design concentrated largely on drafting and then geometric modelling, more recent research has focussed on the development of concepts and tools for design decision making [1]. Where all the design variables take numeric values the processes of simulation can be used during design analysis and evaluation. In some cases simulation can be used with symbolic valued variables. When, in addition, a set of goals or objectives or fitnesses can be expressed in terms of those variables, the processes of optimisation can be used and we have a design optimisation or optimal design problems [2]. Evolutionary systems have proven to be particularly useful in design optimisation [3]]. When the variables are symbolic rather than numeric, artificial intelligence methods have proven to be useful [4].