Towards a logical framework for engineering design processes

This paper reports on a new aspect of the author's ongoing research to develop a logical framework for engineering design processes. Since this is a new project, the goal of this paper is to describe the nature of the problem being studied, to sketch the architecture of the system being developed to address it, and to identify various areas of application. Reasoning about design processes is found to be a task essentially about reasoning about product knowledge. A recently developed logic, called ALX3, has been found to provide all the basic mechanisms for representing design processes. ADPM will extend ALX3 to support directly the kinds of knowledge needed for design processes to occur. Some examples from the area of automotive engineering are used to indicate some of ADPM's benefits in practical environments.