Online monitoring and evaluation for conceptual design of product morphological structure driven by the retrospective analysis of cognitive behaviour

Monitoring and understanding designers' design behaviour holds significant value for optimising the design paradigm and enhancing its quality and efficiency. This paper focuses on computer-aided conceptual design of product morphological structures, presenting a design monitoring and evaluation method driven by retrospective analysis of the association of designers' cognitive behaviour. To begin with the monitoring perspective, the article analyzes the characteristics and collection methods of three types of design cognitive behaviour data. It also provides a behaviour element sequence transcription model, encompassing cognitive behaviour encoding, sketch behaviour encoding, and hierarchical encoding of design problems. Subsequently, a quantitative analysis index system is established with three dimensions: cognitive behaviour order, design state credibility, and thinking transition stability. By retrospectively analyzing the evolutionary relationships among fundamental design cognitive behavioural elements and referring to knowledge of design cognitive behavioural laws, designers' cognitive preference type and state fluctuations can be distinguished. Finally, a hybrid fuzzy multi-attribute evaluation method is applied to filter various transcriptional combinations and calculate a comprehensive evaluation score. A real conceptual design experiment has preliminarily demonstrated the effectiveness of the introduced method.