Design rules application in manufacturing industries: a state of the art survey and proposal of a context-aware approach

Abstract

[Context] In manufacturing industries, the design of a product needs to com-ply with many design rules. These rules are essentials as they help industrial designers to create high quality designs in an efficient way. [Problem] How-ever, the management of an ever-increasing number of design rules becomes a real problem, especially for novice designers. Even if there exists some knowledge engineering tools for managing design rules, their capabilities are still limited and many companies continue to store their design rules in un-structured documents. Nowadays, the application of design rules remains a difficult task that needs a circular validation process between many experts in a manufacturing company. [Proposition] In this paper, we will analyze the main existing approaches for the application of design rules and we will demonstrate the need of a new approach to improve the current state-of-the-art practices. To minimize rule application impact on the design process, we propose to develop a Context-Aware Design Assistant that will recommend design rules on the fly while using computer-aided design software. Our de-sign assistant relies on the modelling of the design rules and the design con-text in a single knowledge graph that can fuel a recommendation engine. [Fu-ture Work] In future work, we will describe the technical structure of the Con-text-Aware Design Assistant and develop it. The potential outcome of this re-search are: a better workflow integration of design rules application, a proac-tive verification of design solutions, a continuous learning of design rules and the detection and automation of design routines.