Assembly model-enhanced design knowledge to support automated conceptual design

Conceptual design is perhaps the most important phase in any product design industry...Concept generation tools facilitate the generation of possible solutions for a given design problem. Even though researchers have developed both conventional and non-conventional techniques for concept generation, apparently no general computer algorithm has been established and the level of abstraction is not uniform across all methods. The main objective of this work is to create representations of design knowledge to effectively support automated conceptual design --Abstract, page iii