Function-Based Computer Aided Conceptual Design Support Tool

Conceptual design is considered as the most critical and important phase of design process. It is the stage where product’s fundamental features are determined, large proportion of the lifecycle cost of the product is committed, and other major decisions are made, which have significant impact on the downstream design and related manufacturing processes. It is a knowledge intensive process where diverse knowledge and several years of experience are put together to design quality and cost effective products. Unfortunately, computer support systems for this phase are lagging behind compared to the currently available commercial computer aided design (CAD) tools for the later stage of design to reduce the designers workload and product development time. The overall goal of this research is to provide designers with computational tool that support conceptual design process. To achieve this goal a methodology that integrates systematic design approach with knowledge-based system is proposed in this thesis. Accordingly, a framework of computer based computational tool known as conceptual design support tool (CDST) is developed using the proposed methodology. The tool assists designers in performing functional modeling by providing standard vocabularies of functions in the form of function library, generate concepts stored in the database from previous designs, display the generated concepts on the morphology chart, combine the concepts and evaluate the concepts variants. Concepts from subsea processing equipment design have been collected and saved in the database. The tool also accepts new concepts from the designer through its knowledge acquisition system to be saved in the database for future use. In doing so, it is possible to integrate human creativity with data handling capabilities of computers to perform conceptual design more efficiently than solely manual design. The tool can also be used as a knowledge management system to preserve expert’s knowledge and train novice designers. The applicability of the proposed methodology and developed tool is illustrated and validated by using a case study and validation test conducted by independent evaluators