Abstract
Design activities consists not only of product design, but also of development of the process by which the product will be designed. However, development and documentation of computational design processes are largely unsupported by commercial CAD systems. This paper proposes a new computational architecture for procedural representation of embodiment design processes. A design actor is defined as an independent computational unit of the design process. The proposed architecture models a design process as a sequence of design tasks by representing individual parameters and tasks as design actors, and the sequence of design tasks as a network of design actors assembled according to their functional dependencies. The use of design actors promotes modularity in representing design problems and solution processes. Iterative design processes can be represented since the architecture provides explicit feedforward and feedback information exchange between design actors. The paper describes an object-oriented implementation of the design actor architecture, and demonstrates the approach with an example design of an air-core solenoid in an optical disk drive.
