| Decomposition of engineering design spaces has been performed primarily through statistical and system identification techniques. However, no approach has yet attempted to capture the semantics of a design through decomposition. This thesis presents graphical techniques for capturing the semantics of a design by developing an information architecture through design space decomposition using concept maps. In particular, concept maps are used to begin identifying the top layers of the information architecture of a problem, which has the dual effects of performing an initial decomposition of the design space and refining the parameters that will define more detailed design spaces for further decomposition using traditional techniques. By demonstrating these techniques in two case studies, the techniques are shown to capture the semantics of a design in a computable format. |
