Abstract

Reuse of prior design experience allows an engineer to save design time, by leveraging off previous work-out solutions, and to avoid repeating past mistakes, by accessing information on manufacturing or field failures. Indexing and retrieving of design cases is efficiently done based on qualitative descriptions of the behavior specification of a device. Qualitative influences has been used for behavior representation and reasoning since they allow behavior decomposition and synthesis of design parts taken from different contexts. Thus, innovative new designs are generated. However, a drawback of this kind of high-level abstractions is that important performance information contained in design specifications is not taken into account. In this article, performance information such as ranges of operation and types of response are added to the qualitative behavior representation. Higher-order behavior representations are also studied. Reasoning mechanisms are accordingly extended for index generation and retrieval of previous designs. As a result of considering performance information, the number of synthesized designs not performing according to specification can be reduced. Analysis and simulation time spent in design verification is, thereby, also reduced.

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