This paper discusses the development of an experimental software prototype that uses surrogate models for predicting the monthly energy consumption of urban-scale community design scenarios in real time. The surrogate models were prepared by training artificial neural networks on datasets of urban form and monthly energy consumption values of all zip codes in San Diego county. The surrogate models were then used as the simulation engine of a generative urban design tool, which generates hypothetical communities in San Diego following the county's existing urban typologies and then estimates the monthly energy consumption value of each generated design option. This paper and developed software prototype is part of a larger research project that evaluates the energy performance of community microgrids via their urban spatial configurations. This prototype takes the first step in introducing a new set of tools for architects and urban designers with the goal of engaging them in the development process of community microgrids.

There are growing efforts to mine public and common-sense semantic network databases for engineering design ideation stimuli. However, there is still a lack of design ideation aids based on semantic network databases that are specialized in engineering or technology-based knowledge. In this study, we present a new methodology of using the Technology Semantic Network (TechNet) to stimulate idea generation in engineering design. The core of the methodology is to guide the inference of new technical concepts in the white space surrounding a focal design domain according to their semantic distance in the large TechNet, for potential syntheses into new design ideas. We demonstrate the effectiveness in general, and use strategies and ideation outcome implications of the methodology via a case study of flying car design idea generation.

This paper presents the results of a study that explores the effect of a visual constraint on design behaviors of architecture students. To examine this effect, 24 second-year architecture students volunteered to participate. Each of them undertook similar conceptual design briefs in two different conditions, one with and another without a visual constraint. Retrospective reporting was used to collect the verbalization of participants. The FBS ontology was used to model the design cognition of the participants by coding their design protocols. A dynamic analysis was used to study the differences between the two conditions based on the problem–solution index. A further index, the pre-structure–post-structure index, was proposed to measure design behavior differences between the two conditions. The correspondence analysis was used to explore the effect of gender. There were statistically significant differences in the distributions of cognitive effort between the two groups. These differences include in the visual constraint group a decrease in the focus on behavior before structure and in the processes related to it, compared to the non-visual constraint group. The non-visual constraint group changed their focus on problem framing and solving while adding a visual constraint led participants to focus simultaneously on both framing and solving. The visual constraint group had a different attention temporally to pre- and post-structure design processes during designing than the non-visual constraint group. The order of experiencing the two design sessions had only a small effect. The results of correspondence analysis demonstrate that there are categorical gender differences not found using statistical testing.

Prolonged sitting in a fixed or constrained position exposes aircraft passengers to long-term static loading of their bodies, which has deleterious effects on passengers’ comfort throughout the duration of the flight. The previous studies focused primarily on office and driving sitting postures and few studies, however, focused on the sitting postures of passengers in aircraft. Consequently, the aim of the present study is to detect and recognize the sitting postures of aircraft passengers in relation to sitting discomfort. A total of 24 subjects were recruited for the experiment, which lasted for 2 h. Furthermore, a total of 489 sitting postures were extracted and the pressure data between subjects and seat was collected from the experiment. After the detection of sitting postures, eight types of sitting postures were classified based on key parts (trunk, back, and legs) of the human bodies. Thereafter, the eight types of sitting postures were recognized with the aid of pressure data of seat pan and backrest employing several machine learning methods. The best classification rate of 89.26% was obtained from the support vector machine (SVM) with radial basis function (RBF) kernel. The detection and recognition of the eight types of sitting postures of aircraft passengers in this study provided an insight into aircraft passengers’ discomfort and seat design.

Over the past decade, engineering design research has seen a significant surge of the discussion of empathy. As such, design researchers have been devoted in devising and assessing empathic design activities. While prior research has examined the utility of empathic design experiences on driving creative concept generation, little is known about the role of a designer's empathic tendencies in driving creative concept generation and selection in an engineering design project. Without this knowledge, we cannot be sure if, when, or how empathy influences the design process. Thus, the main goal of this paper was to identify the role of trait empathy in creative concept generation and selection in an engineering design student project. In order to achieve this objective, a study was conducted with 103 first-year engineering students during two design stages of an 8-week design project (concept generation and concept selection). The main findings from this paper highlighted that empathic concern tendencies positively impacted the generation of more ideas while personal distress tendencies negatively impacted the generation of more ideas. During concept selection, perspective-taking tendencies positively impacted participants’ propensity for selecting elegant ideas. This research took the first step in encouraging empirical investigations aimed at understanding the role of trait empathy across different stages of the design process.

Though they can be traced back to different roots, both smart design and smart systems have to do with the recent developments of artificial intelligence. There are two major questions related to them: (i) What way are smart design and smart systems enabled by artificial narrow, general, or super intelligence? and (ii) How can smart design be used in the realization of smart systems? and How can smart systems contribute to smart designing? A difficulty is that there are no exact definitions for these novel concepts in the literature. The endeavor to analyze the current situation and to answer the above questions stimulated an exploratory research whose first findings are summarized in this paper. Its first part elaborates on a plausible interpretation of the concept of smartness and provides an overview of the characteristics of smart design as a creative problem solving methodology supported by artificial intelligence. The second part exposes the paradigmatic features and system engineering issues of smart systems, which are equipped with application-specific synthetic system knowledge and reasoning mechanisms. The third part presents and elaborates on a conceptual model of AI-based couplings of smart design and smart systems. The couplings may manifest in various concrete forms in real life that are referred to as “connectors” in this paper. The principal types of connectors are exemplified and discussed. It has been found that smart design tends to manifest as a methodology of blue-printing smart systems and that smart systems will be intellectualized the enablers of implementation of smart design. Understanding the affordances of and creating proper connectors between smart design and smart systems need further explorative research.

With the increasing demand for a personalized product and rapid market response, many companies expect to explore online user-generated content (UGC) for intelligent customer hearing and product redesign strategy. UGC has the advantages of being more unbiased than traditional interviews, yielding in-time response, and widely accessible with a sheer volume. From online resources, customers’ preferences toward various aspects of the product can be exploited by promising sentiment analysis methods. However, due to the complexity of language, state-of-the-art sentiment analysis methods are still not accurate for practice use in product redesign. To tackle this problem, we propose an integrated customer hearing and product redesign system, which combines the robust use of sentiment analysis for customer hearing and coordinated redesign mechanisms. Ontology and expert knowledges are involved to promote the accuracy. Specifically, a fuzzy product ontology that contains domain knowledges is first learned in a semi-supervised way. Then, UGC is exploited with a novel ontology-based fine-grained sentiment analysis approach. Extracted customer preference statistics are transformed into multilevels, for the automatic establishment of opportunity landscapes and house of quality table. Besides, customer preference statistics are interactively visualized, through which representative customer feedbacks are concurrently generated. Through a case study of smartphone, the effectiveness of the proposed system is validated, and applicable redesign strategies for a case product are provided. With this system, information including customer preferences, user experiences, using habits and conditions can be exploited together for reliable product redesign strategy elicitation.

Literature suggests that people typically understand knowledge by induction and produce knowledge by synthesis. This paper revisits the various modes of reasoning – explanatory abduction, innovative abduction, deduction, and induction – that have been proposed by earlier researchers as crucial modes of reasoning underlying the design process. First, our paper expands earlier work on abductive reasoning – an essential mode of reasoning involved in the process of synthesis – by understanding its role with the help of the “SAPPhIRE” model of causality. The explanations of abductive reasoning in design using the SAPPhIRE model have been compared with those using existing models. Second, the paper captures and analyzes various modes of reasoning during design synthesis with the help of the “Extended Integrated Model of Designing”. The analysis of participants' verbal speech and outcomes shows the model's ability to explain the various modes of reasoning that occur in design. The results indicate the above models to provide a more extensive account of reasoning in design synthesis. Earlier empirical validation of both the models lends further support to the claim of their explanatory capacity.

Early childhood education has long-lasting influences on people, and an appropriate companion toy can play an essential role in children's brain development. This paper establishes a complete framework to guide the design of intelligent companion toys for preschool children from 2 to 6 years old, which is child-centered and environment-oriented. The design process is divided into three steps: requirement confirmation, the smart design before the sale, and the iterative update after the sale. This framework considers the characteristics of children and highlights the integration of human and artificial intelligence in design. A case study is provided to prove the superiority of the new framework. In addition to enriching the research on intelligent toy design, this paper also guides for practitioners to design smart toys and helps in children's cognitive development.

Industry 4.0 represents high-level methodologies for the development of new generation manufacturing metrology systems, which are more intelligent (smart), autonomous, flexible, high-productive, and self-adaptable. One of the systems capable of responding to these challenges is a cyber-physical manufacturing metrology system (CP2MS) with techniques of artificial intelligence (AI). In general, CP2MS systems generate Big data, horizontally by integration [coordinate measuring machines (CMMs)] and vertically by control. This paper presents a cyber-physical manufacturing metrology model (CP3M) for Industry 4.0 developed by applying AI techniques such as engineering ontology (EO), ant-colony optimization (ACO), and genetic algorithms (GAs). Particularly, the CP3M presents an intelligent approach of probe configuration and setup planning for inspection of prismatic measurement parts (PMPs) on a CMM. A set of possible PMP setups and probe configurations is reduced to optimal number using developed GA-based methodology. The major novelty is the development of a new CP3M capable of responding to the requirements of an Industry 4.0 concept such as intelligent, autonomous, and productive measuring systems. As such, they respond to one smart metrology requirement within the framework of Industry 4.0, referring to the optimal number of PMPs setups and for each setup defines the configurations of probes. The main contribution of the model is productivity increase of the measuring process through the reduction of the total measurement time, as well as the elimination of errors due to the human factor through intelligent planning of probe configuration and part setup. The experiment was successfully performed using a PMP specially designed and manufactured for the purpose.

Functional design is regarded as a design activity primarily aimed at clarifying customer needs, and developing the functional architecture and solution concepts for a system under development. Existing functional design approaches are mainly focused on how to assist designers in searching for solution principles for desired products, which, however, do not adequately take into account the interactions between a smart system under development and its environment, and cannot explicitly represent the complex functional logic of the system, resulting in that they cannot effectively assist designers in the functional design of smart systems. Therefore, this paper proposes a scenario-integrated approach for functional design of smart systems to address the above issues. Based on the concept of scenario in software engineering, the proposed approach explicitly elaborates how to employ scenarios to express subjective customer needs and how to generate the functional architectures and the corresponding solution concepts through a structured process. The functional design of the automated doors-unlocking system of a smart vehicle is employed to illustrate the proposed approach, which also demonstrates that the proposed approach is suitable for functional design of smart systems.

Cyber–physical–social systems (CPSS) are physical devices that are embedded in human society and possess highly integrated functionalities of sensing, computing, communication, and control. CPSS rely on their intense collaboration and information sharing through networks to be functioning. In this paper, topology-informed network information dynamics models are proposed to characterize the evolution of information processing capabilities of CPSS nodes in networks. The models are based on a mesoscale probabilistic graph model, where the sensing and computing capabilities of the nodes are captured as the probabilities of correct predictions. A topology-informed vector autoregression model and a latent variable vector autoregression model are proposed to model the correlations between prediction capabilities of nodes as linear functional relationships. A hybrid Gaussian process regression model is also developed to capture both the nonlinear spatial and temporal correlations between nodes. The new information dynamics models are demonstrated and tested with a simulator of CPSS networks. The results show that the topological information of networks can improve the efficiency in constructing the time series models. The network topology also has influences on the prediction capabilities of CPSS.

Ti–6Al–4V alloy has superior material properties such as high strength-to-weight ratio, good corrosion resistance, and excellent fracture toughness. Therefore, it is widely used in aerospace, medical, and automotive industries where machining is an essential process for these industries. However, machining of Ti–6Al–4V is a material with extremely low machinability characteristics; thus, conventional machining methods are not appropriate to machine such materials. Ultrasonic-assisted machining (UAM) is a novel hybrid machining method which has numerous advantages over conventional machining processes. In addition, minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) is an alternative type of metal cutting fluid application that is being used instead of conventional lubrication in machining. One of the parameters which could be used to measure the performance of the machining process is the amount of cutting force. Nevertheless, there is a number of limited studies to compare the changes in cutting forces by using UAM and MQL together which are time-consuming and not cost-effective. Artificial neural network (ANN) is an alternative method that may eliminate the limitations mentioned above by estimating the outputs with the limited number of data. In this study, a model was developed and coded in Python programming environment in order to predict cutting forces using ANN. The results showed that experimental cutting forces were estimated with a successful prediction rate of 0.99 with mean absolute percentage error and mean squared error of 1.85% and 13.1, respectively. Moreover, considering too limited experimental data, ANN provided acceptable results in a cost- and time-effective way.

Self-organizing systems (SOS) are developed to perform complex tasks in unforeseen situations with adaptability. Predefining rules for self-organizing agents can be challenging, especially in tasks with high complexity and changing environments. Our previous work has introduced a multiagent reinforcement learning (RL) model as a design approach to solving the rule generation problem of SOS. A deep multiagent RL algorithm was devised to train agents to acquire the task and self-organizing knowledge. However, the simulation was based on one specific task environment. Sensitivity of SOS to reward functions and systematic evaluation of SOS designed with multiagent RL remain an issue. In this paper, we introduced a rotation reward function to regulate agent behaviors during training and tested different weights of such reward on SOS performance in two case studies: box-pushing and T-shape assembly. Additionally, we proposed three metrics to evaluate the SOS: learning stability, quality of learned knowledge, and scalability. Results show that depending on the type of tasks; designers may choose appropriate weights of rotation reward to obtain the full potential of agents’ learning capability. Good learning stability and quality of knowledge can be achieved with an optimal range of team sizes. Scaling up to larger team sizes has better performance than scaling downwards.

This paper presents a preliminary study into the spatial features that can be used to distinguish creativity andefficiency in design layouts, and the distinct pattern of cognitive and metacognitive activity that is associated with creative design. In a design experiment, a group of 12 architects were handed a design brief. Their drawing activity was recorded and they were required to externalize their thoughts during the design process. Both design solutions and verbal comments were analysed and modelled. A separate group of experienced architects used their expert knowledge to assign creativity and efficiency scores to the 12 design solutions. The design solutions were evaluated spatially. Protocol analysis studies including linkography and macroscopic analysis were used to discern distinctive patterns in the cognitive and metacognition activity of designs marked with the highest and least creativity scores. Entropy models of the linkographs and knowledge graphs were further introduced Finally, we assessed how creativity and efficiency correlates to experiment variables, cognitive activity, metacognitive activity, spatial and functional distribution of spaces in the design solutions, and the number and type of design constraints applied through the course of design. Through this investigation, we suggest that expert knowledge can be used to assess creativity and efficiency in designs. Our findings indicate that efficient layouts have distinct spatial features, and that cognitive and metacognitive activity in design that yields a highly creative outcome corresponds to higher frequencies of design moves and higher linkages between design moves.

Automatic generation of high-quality meshes is a base of CAD/CAE systems. The element extraction is a major mesh generation method for its capabilities to generate high-quality meshes around the domain boundary and to control local mesh densities. However, its widespread applications have been inhibited by the difficulties in generating satisfactory meshes in the interior of a domain or even in generating a complete mesh. The element extraction method's primary challenge is to define element extraction rules for achieving high-quality meshes in both the boundary and the interior of a geometric domain with complex shapes. This paper presents a self-learning element extraction system, FreeMesh-S, that can automatically acquire robust and high-quality element extraction rules. Two central components enable the FreeMesh-S: (1) three primitive structures of element extraction rules, which are constructed according to boundary patterns of any geometric boundary shapes; (2) a novel self-learning schema, which is used to automatically define and refine the relationships between the parameters included in the element extraction rules, by combining an Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) reinforcement learning network and a Feedforward Neural Network (FNN). The A2C network learns the mesh generation process through random mesh element extraction actions using element quality as a reward signal and produces high-quality elements over time. The FNN takes the mesh generated from the A2C as samples to train itself for the fast generation of high-quality elements. FreeMesh-S is demonstrated by its application to two-dimensional quad mesh generation. The meshing performance of FreeMesh-S is compared with three existing popular approaches on ten pre-defined domain boundaries. The experimental results show that even with much less domain knowledge required to develop the algorithm, FreeMesh-S outperforms those three approaches in essential indices. FreeMesh-S significantly reduces the time and expertise needed to create high-quality mesh generation algorithms.

It is known that wherever there is human interaction, there is social influence. Here, we refer to more influential individuals as “influencers”, who drive team processes for better or worst. Social influence gives rise to social learning, the propensity of humans to mimic the most influential individuals. As individual learning is affected by the presence of an influencer, so is an individual's idea generation . Examining this phenomenon through a series of human studies would require an enormous amount of time to study both individual and team behaviors that affect design outcomes. Hence, this paper provides an agent-based approach to study the effect of influencers during idea generation. This model is supported by the results of two empirical experiments which validate the assumptions and sustain the logic implemented in the model. The results of the model simulation make it possible to examine the impact of influencers on design outcomes, assessed in the form of exploration of design solution space and quality of the solution. The results show that teams with a few prominent influencers generate solutions with limited diversity. Moreover, during idea generation, the behavior of the teams with uniform distribution of influence is regulated by their team members' self-efficacy.

The development of autonomous greenhouses has caught the interest of many researchers and industrial considering their potential of offering an optimal environment for the growth of high-quality crops with minimum resources. Since an autonomous greenhouse is a mechatronic system, the consideration of its subsystem (e.g. heating systems) and component (e.g. actuators and sensors) interactions early in the design phase can ease the product development process. Indeed, this consideration could shorten the design process, reduce the number of redesign loops, and improve the performance of the overall mechatronic system. In the case of a greenhouse, it would lead to a higher quality of the crops and a better management of resources. In this work, the layout design of a general autonomous greenhouse is translated into an optimization problem statement while considering product-related dependencies. Then, a genetic algorithm is used to carry out the optimization of the layout design. The methodology is applied to the design of a fully autonomous greenhouse (45 cm × 30 cm × 30 cm) for the growth of plants in space. Although some objectives are conflictual, the developed algorithm proposes a compromise to obtain a near-optimal feasible layout design. The algorithm was also able to optimize the volume of components (occupied space) while considering the energy consumption and the overall mass. Their respective summed values are 2844.32 cm3, which represents 7% of the total volume, 5.86 W, and 655.8 g.