Automated Concept Generation: A Co-Evolutionary Approach

Conceptual design is a key early activity in product development. However, limited understanding of the conceptual design process and lack of quantitative information at this stage of design pose difficulties for effective design concept generation and evaluation. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical co-evolutionary approach to supporting design concept generation and evaluation. The approach adopts a zigzag process in which grammar rules guide function decomposition and functions and means co-evolve at each level of decomposition hierarchy. It provides an automatic computational solution to complex conceptual design systems. In this paper, the details of the approach are described, and an example of designing a mechanical personal transporter is presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.