Domain-independent engineering design system using Design Scripts

Engineering design requires knowledge from many different disciplines. If designers work with different design formats and are not colocated, more time and resource may be required to perform a design. In order to reduce design cycle time and to smooth the transition to manufacturing, it is necessary to have sharable design descriptions that are electronically transportable. Design is an integrative process that is difficult to definitively define. This work presents a Design Script concept that is being applied to generic engineering design in IC packaging and simple mechanical design and is applicable to knowledge representation in essentially any engineering domain.; Design Scripts are developed through encapsulation of generic design activities and hierarchical design part representations based on problem decomposition. The system is being implemented using the CLIPS expert system shell with a Windows NT graphical user interface. The relationships between physical design objects and their subparts can be constructed in a hierarchical manner. This same design process is repeatedly applied at each level of the subpart hierarchy and recursively into lower levels of the design problem. Each Design Script is compiled into a (CLIPS) class that represents salient aspects and requirements (goals) for each structure and subpart.; Design knowledge capture can be a difficult process. The basic problem is how to transfer design knowledge from a human being's design knowledge, which is used to do design in the real world, to a machine understandable format. Design knowledge entry to the computer system and the representation of such knowledge are important issues. To make the knowledge entry process easier, design dialogs are being developed to guide the user what to be captured in building design knowledge. Simple design examples employing Design Scripts will be discussed.