The Case for a Case-based Design Assistant

A joint research programme currently being undertaken at Coventry University and the University of the West of England, Bristol, is concerned with developing a useful tool, for the novice or expert designer, which directly supports the conceptual design generation process in the field of mechanical device design. The COnceptual Design ASsistant (CODAS) achieves this by utilising knowledge of past successful solutions and then generating new devices, which can be either novel or routine, that are functionally capable of satisfying the stated device requirements. Case Based Reasoning (CBR) technology is used to store and retrieve past design solutions which are defined in terms of a symbolic representation language. The underlying design model is function based and employs a divergent function to form mapping technique to produce physical embodiments of the proposed functional solutions. The technique has been developed in the field of mechanical device design and is now being developed for use in the prosthetic design field