The development of parametric shape grammars integrated with an interactive evolutionary system for supporting product design exploration

This thesis has developed an interactive system that uses parametric 2D and 3D shape grammars incorporating an evolutionary algorithm for exploring product forms at the early stage of design process. The evolutionary algorithm allows designers to explore product forms by modifying the control parameters of shapes and changing the application of shape grammar rules based on the interaction between designers and the system.; This research focuses on two issues: (1) The development of systematic approach to the formulation of shape grammars combining 2D and 3D forms and (2) Extending the generative capability of the product design support systems which use shape grammars. The aim of these two focuses is to enhance the power of shape grammar based design approach in terms of dealing with complexity of real design applications and to explore the potential of integrating evolutionary methods with shape grammars for increasing diversity in product design.; A shape grammar rule base for digital camera design is developed and two prototype systems are implemented using this rule base in order to study the feasibility of proposed system with its supporting components, including the integration with an external 3D solid modelling kernel. The development and experiments of two prototype evolutionary systems illustrated the flexibility in using parametric 2D and 3D shape grammars with labels to explore a wide range of engineering and industrial design problems involving complex and intuitive conception of forms and products. Both implemented systems are interactive, with the first one using a normal evolutionary algorithm, and the second one using genetic programming with parametric shape grammars. The experiments showed that the second prototype is more flexible, while more complex to implement, for the exploration of forms in terms of variety with the parameters within shape grammar rules being changed by the evolutionary algorithms. Based on the analysis and the evaluation of the results achieved in the context of real product design, the thesis concludes on the applicability of shape grammars to real product design and proposes several strategies with which this research can be further advanced for complex form design and visualisation in product design.