Constraint-Based Support for Insightful Design Decision Making and Engineering Design Exploration

Engineering design is characterized as an iterative decision making process. Designers are required to make many decisions and explore design alternatives for selecting optimal options based on insights into underlying relationships between design parameters. As design proceeds, more and more design parameters are introduced to describe design solutions more precisely. The increase of design parameters poses challenge and difficulties for designers to gain deep and rich insights. This research aims to provide design support tools for gaining better insights, and to integrate them into a design support system which facilitates designers to explore design solutions. To achieve this aim, constraint paradigm has been introduced for representation of a design problem and design solutions, and new constraint solving methods based on generic and rigorous principles of symbolic algebra have been derived. These methods collectively overcome difficulties of conventional analysis methods, and provide necessary and sufficient information for making insightful design decisions. They have been implemented into a prototype system, which helps designers in describing a design concept, defining constraints, exploring design alternatives, and solving design problems.