Discovering Methodologies for Integrated Product Design

Abstract

The current methodologies for multi-disciplinary product design are based on compromising between different disci plines rather than integrating them. These methodologies do not use a systematic and holistic approach to the problem of multi-disciplinary design and thus are piecemeal rather than comprehensive. This paper presents a new approach to pro ducing design methodologies for integration of the different disciplines in the design process. A multi-agent system has been developed that designs a 2-DOF robot arm by incorpo rating five proposed strategies for integration between disci plines. Design methodologies are extracted by tracking the system and generalizing the traces that are produced. The results show that the trace of the system provides invaluable information on how to improve the design process.