A feature-based approach to conceptual design process

Product design is an iterative, complex and decision-making process, performed by designers. It usually starts with recognising and specifying requirements and demands, followed by searching for an optimum solution for the required tasks. After an evaluation of the concept solutions and the selection of promising solutions comes detailing, with the layout definition, and a description of the product. Conceptual design has been recognised as an important part of the design process, but receives weak computer support due to complex and informal data that is hard to retrieve, store and maintain with computers. Besides geometrical data, it is important to capture, represent and process the function and the behaviour of a product. The presented approach is feature-based modelling of product semantics and function that takes place already in the conceptual design phase. The features are then the information carriers that allow modelling of the relationships between the requirements of a product, its functional descriptions and physical solutions. These features will also bring this information to the downstream applications. (C) 2003 Journal of Mechanical Engineering. All rights reserved.