Graph structures are fundamental in many aspects of design. This paper discusses a way to improve access to design spaces of graph structures, by converting graph structures into numerical values and vice versa. Mathematical properties of such conversions are described, and those that are desirable are identified. A candidate conversion algorithm, Indexed Stacked Blocks, is proposed. Its use and benefits are illustrated through an example graph-structure design problem. The example demonstrates that such conversions allow design spaces of graph structures to be visualized, sampled, and evaluated. In principle, they also allow other powerful numerical techniques to be applied to the design of graph-structure-based systems.

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A product's architecture can affect many aspects of product and process quality, from technical performance to the design effort required, production costs and satisfaction of later lifecycle requirements. This paper explores how computational tools can augment creative methods in product architecture design. Based on an empirical study aiming to understand the context of product architecture design, a new computational method is proposed to support this activity. In the method, product architectures-networks of components linked by connections- can be synthesised using constraints on the structure of the network to define the set of 'realisable' architectures for a product. An example illustrates how the method might be used on a real design problem, including the construction of an appropriate set of network structure constraints and the identification of promising architectures from the synthesis results. Preliminary evaluation of the method's usability, assessed through a laboratory experiment, and its utility, assessed through application to a real historical design problem, supported by initial validation by an engineer from the case study company, suggests that the method has value for engineering design practice.

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The Contact and Channel Approach (CC-A) has been developed to support the decomposition and design of technical systems. It is based on the principle that function and form emerge together during design, and therefore should be considered together in a design representation. This paper discusses the theory underlying the CC-A, and describes its formalization and implementation in a software tool. The approach is applied to model the system architecture of a humanoid robot arm considering the impact of a proposed design change. This illustrates some of the main benefits of the Contact and Channel Approach: helping designers visualize, understand and communicate the complex dependencies between function and form in a system architecture.@en

The architecture of a product is important for its lifecycle performance, but incremental design is often practised to limit the duration, costs and risks of product development. Using computational design synthesis to simulate real design, it is demonstrated that incremental design can reduce achievable product architecture quality compared with original design, but that the effect can be mitigated by allowing modifications to the carried-over architecture. The results quantify the tradeoff between quality and reuse in design, leading to more informed decision-making during product planning.@en

The choice of product architecture can affect many factors, from the technical performance of a product to the design effort required, production costs, and satisfaction of lifecycle requirements. This paper explores how computational tools can augment creative methods in product architecture design. It describes a method for synthesising product architectures in the form of networks of components. The set of architectures for a product is specified using constraints on the structure of the network. The method has been implemented as a software tool, and an example illustrates how this might be used in practice. Discussion of the example highlights some of the issues which arise through using the method, particularly those of constructing an appropriate set of constraints, and of identifying promising architectures from the large set of synthesis results. Further work will address these issues and evaluate the approach in practice, to compare the cost-benefit ratio with more conventional methods for architecture design (e.g. brainstorming).@en

To support the development and analysis of engineering designs at the embodiment stage, designers work iteratively with representations of those designs as they consider the function and form of their constituent parts. Detailed descriptions of "what a machine does" usually include flows of forces and active principles within the technical system, and their localization within parts and across the interfaces between them. This means that a representation should assist a designer in considering form and function at the same time and at different levels of abstraction. This paper describes a design modelling approach that enables designers to break down a system architecture into its subsystems and parts, while assigning functions and flows to parts and the interfaces between them. In turn, this may reveal further requirements to fulfil functions in order to complete the design. The approach is implemented in a software tool which provides a uniform, computable language allowing the user to describe functions and flows as they are iteratively discovered, created and embodied. A database of parts allows the user to search for existing design solutions. The approach is illustrated through an example: modelling the complex mechanisms within a humanoid robot.

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In many situations it is necessary to explore a set of system architectures, networks of elements linked by directed or undirected relations, where both elements and relations may have types assigned to them. The architectures may represent products in a portfolio or across competitors, or alternative process plans for undertaking a project. However, exploring spaces of system architectures is difficult because they are qualitative structures, and thus are not easy to compare directly. As a proxy for direct comparison, they may be compared using metrics to assign numerical values to them (Lindemann et al., 2008), but such metrics may be difficult to interpret in concrete terms or may require potentially unavailable information (Wyatt et al., 2009a). Alternatively, architectures may be clustered by some measure of "similarity" (Langdon and Chakrabarti, 2001), but strict hierarchical clustering may not recognise the complex similarity relationships that may exist between different architectures. A third alternative is the use of methods such as ΔDSMs (de Weck, 2007) to highlight the differences between two architectures; however, these methods do not allow larger sets to be compared directly. Therefore, a need remains for methods to compare structural characteristics of architectures in larger datasets.@en

This paper seeks to understand how product architecture arises and influences the design process, using a case study of a UK-based diesel engine manufacturer. Product architecture is defined as a combination of functional and physical structure, including definitions of interfaces between components and spatial layout, at the overall product level. In the case study the minimisation of novelty was observed to be a major factor, causing the majority of the function structure and function-to-component mapping to be carried over from previous engines. New technologies are selected at an early stage without being integrated into complete engine concepts. Architecture-level decisions are then made implicitly when carrying over elements from previous products and when cascading product requirements to the component level. Elements of product architecture continue to be defined over much of the New Product Introduction (NPI) process, countering the expectation that product architecture should be defined during early design. These results suggest that support for product architecture design should take account of its incremental and extended nature.@en

In engineering design it is necessary not only to find creative solutions to problems, but to be able to do so without introducing unacceptable levels of risk into the process. This paper studies how engineering firms use creativity within a Business Process Excellence framework, through a case study of diesel engine design. Overall it appears that the emphasis on reliable and repeatable processes causes creativity to be displaced backwards into R&D and forwards into "emergency innovation" during integration.@en

• Computational architecture synthesis can help produce better designs and improve existing ones. • A formalism for establishing the validity of component DSMs is the Architecture Schema presented here, consisting of an ontology of components and connections and two types of constraint (connection requirements and path requirements). • An exhaustive search algorithm can use such a schema to generate all possible architectures allowed by the constraints. • Further work will be undertaken on applying this method to problems involving the redesign of existing products and to systems in other domains (processes and organisations).@en