Abstracting and exploring functional design information for conceptual mechanical product design

The conceptual stage of mechanical product design has been recognised as the most critical product development stage. This is an area which is not addressed by current CAD systems. In this paper, we present our work on the abstraction and exploration of functional design information to support this design area. We consider the exploration of relevant functional design information as an important aspect of design work during this design process. Four aspects of functional design information are abstracted, including function, behaviour, structure and working environment. The working environment information is demonstrated as being useful to the exploration of functional design solutions. The physical behaviour is represented by an input-output flow-of-action, contrary to the commonly-used input-output flow-of-object approach (where object refers to material, energy or signal). Not only is this approach more generic, more importantly, we argue that the input-output flow-of-object is only a physical-level design abstraction, while flow-of-action is a functional-level design abstraction, while flow-of-action is a functional-level design abstraction, hence it can capture design intention. Based on this strategy, we explore functional design information by considering the relevant action flows between the design and its working environment, as well as between the different components of the design, including their attributes, attribute expressions, constraints, and so on. Prototype software has been developed to implement the proposed approaches. A simple design example is used to illustrate the various aspects of functional design information and their exploration process.