A Quantitative Analysis of the Evolution of Design Automation Conference Fields

A quick look to the literature related to “Design” points out the fact that traditional fields are covered by a huge quantity of concepts and sub-topics dealing with various research fields. Some of these fields and related concepts are emerging and others are disappearing. The last two decades provided a large variations in the covered fields—probably because of the computers capacity and the knowledge sharing using the internet- We are convinced that is time now for a global understanding of the evolution of the related preoccupations in order to start a new phase that deals with the next guidelines issues in design. Many researchers and gurus have proposed evolution schemes from an epistemological point of view. However, we believe that we still need a pragmatic analysis of what have been done and what is going on now in the various publications that deals with design, conferences and journals. To do so, we present in this paper an approach that lies on the systematic analysis of the International Design Engineering Technical Conference (IDETC-ASME), the Design Conference, the Integrated Design and Manufacturing in Mechanical Engineering (IDMME) and the International Conference in Engineering Design (ICED). We also consider the major reviews and journals related to design such as Computer-Aided Design, Journal of mechanical design and many others. Our proposition, presents a global overview that shows the time-evolution of the topics, the density production, the emerging areas and concepts. We show then that some topics remain with a great interest and other are in a decreasing period. A specific study of what is going on within the Design Automation Conference is provided and an open discussion is started.