Towards cognitive intelligence-enabled product design: The evolution, state-of-the-art, and future of AI-enabled product design

Abstract

Engineering design researchers have increasing interests in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to a wide range of product design tasks, such as customer requirement analysis, product concept generation, design synthesis, and decision-making in product design. Indeed, AI techniques perform excellently on well-defined design tasks with clear problem definition, specialized solutions, and abundant training data. However, facing the ever-evolving AI techniques rapidly and radically changing the product design manner, there is still a lack of a systematic summary about the current stage of AI-enabled product design. Besides, although the current AI-enabled product design performs excellently on the well-defined tasks, the other advanced design tasks that need cognitive capability can still hardly be satisfyingly completed by the current product design system. This study systematically reviewed the literature on AI-enabled product design to understand its evolution and state-of-the-arts. To bridge the semantic gap between humans and systems, a novel cognitive intelligence-enabled product design (CIPD) framework is proposed, in which cognitive intelligence is the key enabler. The CIPD's key aspects, including its system architecture, human-like capabilities, enabling technologies, and potential applications, are also systematically discussed. It is hoped that this study could contribute to the future directions of the product design field and offer insightful guidance to the practitioners and researchers in their product design process.