DEIMOS: a functional paradigm for mechanical design

Abstract

This paper presents an expert system paradigm for mechanical design that allows control within the system to be guided by the function of the final design. A concept of functional attributes, which incorporates ideas from both functional reasoning (Freeman & Newell '71) and planning, is used to characterize an object's function. These attributes are used to guide design through a top down design paradigm. Functional attributes will produce more novel designs than a system doing routine design and are useful for constructing general purpose design systems because they are not domain dependent. DEIMOS, a small general purpose design system, was built to study the use of functional attributes.