FuncDesigner?a functional design software system

Abstract

Engineering design focuses on the development of products and artefacts to satisfy the specified function. Although considerable advances have been made over the last two decades in functional modelling, there is not very much progress on commercial Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems that really aid the designer in converting functional specifications to concept variants. Based on our previous work on Behaviour-driven Function-Environment-Structure (B-FES) modelling framework, this paper presents a functional design software system, called ''FuncDesigner'', to support the functional design of mechanical products through functional reasoning steps, including causal behavioural reasoning and functional decomposition. A function object library and a behaviour object library have been developed as well to serve as the knowledge base for the computerised functional modelling environment. The proposed functional design software system has been evaluated with a design example of a terminal insertion unit in an automatic assembly system for manufacturing electronic connectors.

How an ontology can infer knowledge to be used in product conceptual design

“…In this way, a great diversity of methodologies for analysis of design process based on the FBS Notwithstanding, Suh [17] describes design as a zigzag between functional requirements and design parameters and Veyrat [18] questions whether design is actually a direct mapping between functions and structure. In order to resolve this question, we combine the concept of the OntoRFB (ontologically clean Functional Basis), Garbacz [12] based on DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) [19] and the model B-FES (Behavior-driven FunctionEnvironment-Structure) [20,21] and create a new ontology with special emphasis on the importance of behavior as the link in the FBS framework.…”