Abstract
Common design practices rely heavily on searching and studying of prior designs, patents, past design rationale, standards and new product announcements. An important step toward automating these activities is the creation of repositories of design information indexed by abstract attributes in addition to low-level structural descriptions. By reusing prior designs or their components an engineer can save design time, by leveraging off previous worked-out solutions, and avoid repeating past mistakes, by accessing information on manufacturing or field failures linked to the retrieved design. Under the case-based design paradigm, an engineer combines parts of different design cases to synthesize a device that satisfies a useful need. Physical synthesis entails taking into account possible interactions between components and sub-assemblies as well as reasoning about the dynamics of the system. In this paper we present a methodology for physical synthesis of design cases and components retrieved by a case-based design tool. Connecting elements for the design cases and components are retrieved from a casebase of connections. Indexing of these connections is based on the mobility restrictions that they impose on the connected parts. The information necessary to accomplish this task is still of a high-level nature, namely, the topology of the artifact and its abstract behavior specification.