Grammatical Evolution of Technical Processes

In the teleological sense, people design new products in order to meet market demands and societal needs and by fulfilling these, they push the boundaries of technical evolution. These demands and needs are met by means of a technical process (TP) inside which the operands are transformed to achieve desired state. If the problem of search for suitable optimal technologies required for the operand transformation within the TP can be tackled computationally, then the transformation alternatives can be obtained in an expedient fashion with the probability of the generation of novel alternatives. The approach considered within this paper proposes a grammatical evolution (GE) based method for the search and optimization of technical processes. The breakdown of the TP as a black-box concept into a system of interrelated sub-processes and operations is done according to the formalized knowledge inside the set of production rules of the Backus-Naur form (BNF). Once the breakdown procedure has produced a state composed solely of terminals, the specification of the needed effects required for establishing the product function structure is complete. This paper presents the breakdown of the TP of tea-brewing as an example.