A multi-disciplinary strategy for computer-aided clothing thermal engineering design

The designers and manufactures in apparel industry have urgent needs in designing clothing with superior thermal functions with user-friendly and cost-effective design tools. This paper presents a multi-disciplinary strategy for computer-aided clothing thermal engineering design. It provides a systematical approach to integrate multi-disciplinary knowledge and transfer it into engineering-oriented design tools, thus the designers and manufacturers can easily carry out 1D, 2D and even 3D clothing thermal engineering designs according to the practical design requirements with a short design cycle and low design cost. The research work of this strategy begins from the investigation of the role of the thermal functions of clothing in the thermal comfort of human body. Then the framework is proposed to integrate the multi-disciplinary knowledge and illustrate the process to achieve the thermal engineering design of clothing. The important issues in the realization of computational simulation are addressed, including multi-scale model integration, data availability of characteristic parameters and hierarchical computational scheme. To issue easy-to-use design tools, the thermal functional design of clothing is quantified with important influence parameters, and the user-friendly wizard is designed for the CAD system development. Finally, the design applications of this strategy are discussed in terms of 1D, 2D and 3D thermal engineering designs with versatile CAD systems.     

Design frameworks for concurrent engineering

As technological tasks in manufacturing environment have become progressively complicated, today's designers are confronted not only with increasing complexity of product designs but also with constantly increasing number and complexity of specialized design tools. The entire design process has consequently become very complicated. A large number of highly specialized design tools have to be developed to meet the technological needs of complex design tasks, and integrated into a computer-aided design (CAD) framework to provide better services to users. The concept of the framework may be of special interest to those who try to implement the philosophy of concurrent engineering, because a large number of design tools are required during the design phase to examine the entire aspects of a product's life-cycle in a coherent way. This paper identifies the needs and requirements of such CAD frameworks for concurrent engineering environment and discussed the object-oriented paradigm which has several salient features applicable to the development of control mechanisms for CAD tools within the framework.     

A formal approach to managing design processes

To capture market opportunities, competition within the microelectronics industry demands ever-faster product development, which means ever-shorter design cycles. Shorter design cycles can be achieved by carefully managing the design process during rapid prototyping. Careful management is important because the design process must be (1) adjusted to accommodate constraints such as product performance and design time, and (2) frequently updated to take advantage of new design tools and methodologies. Traditionally, designers have used whatever tools seemed convenient to them at the time, which has made it virtually impossible to determine what methodology was used to produce a given design. These problems can be avoided through design methodology management, which ensures that appropriate tools are selected and executed in the appropriate sequence. Effective design management requires an environment equipped with a formal representation of supported design processes and tools, and an execution environment that helps designers select and execute an appropriate design process. We propose a methodology management system that provides this functionality     

Mechanism synthesis using the workstation environment

Some capabilities of modern engineering workstations and their impact on the mechanism synthesis process are discussed. Specific examples of ongoing work at the University of Minnesota utilizing the Apollo color raster workstation to provide user-friendly general-purpose user-interface tools are presented. The application of these tools to the LINCAGES-4 four-bar linkage synthesis and analysis program and the Minn-Dwell dwell mechanism synthesis program is described. The impact that this environment can have on computer-aided design is assessed     

高性能知识库构造环境

知识库系统(KBS)开发环境的特点是简便性和领域适应性。我们认为如果在KBS开发环境中既有抽象结均,又有多种集成工具,则该环境将会非常有效。本文介绍一个KBS 开发环境DECISION-E,它有一个适应应用领域KBS 的清晰、灵活的抽象结构,而且还有许多集成工具。这种结构使得DECISION-E能建立多种现实领域中的KBS,并使建立的KBS能较全面地反映应用领域的性质。集成工具将辅助设计者建立KBS,支持KBS 的问题求解并进行多种事务处理。在DECISIGN-E 中还采用了下面的一些特殊技术:不同层次的知识表达方法,多推理机,推理中断处理,基于全局黑板的分布式问题求解,基于知识的建模及数据抽象,演绎数据库管理方法。     

Embarking on Spoken-Language NL Interface Design

Natural language (NL) user interfaces are growing in popularity. Unfortunately, the complexity of NL interaction makes these interfaces difficult to design. For NL interfaces to become successful, universal tools are needed to help support the NL design process. What work practice should these tools explicitly support? Interviews with NL designers and our own experiments have identified a specific work practice that designers should consider as they begin to incorporate NL into user interface designs. The work practice study highlights the value of using Wizard of Oz prototyping in NL design. We describe a tool that we have built, called SUEDE, to explicitly support the first stage of NL design for spoken-language user interfaces. Our tools and tools like it will help make NL in human-computer interaction (HCI) more commonplace.     

VDVAS：一个集成的虚拟设计与虚拟装配系统

随着虚拟现实技术的逐渐成熟，研究者们已将其引入到工程领域，为实现虚拟设计与虚拟装配过程的集成，避免现有的虚拟装配系统中，虚拟环境与CAD系统间所必需进行的复杂的、无谓的数据传输，描述了一个基于多通道的、集成的虚拟设计与虚拟装配系统VDVAS。在该系统中，设计得可以通过直接三维操作和语音命令直观方便地建立机械零件及其装配模型，并通过交互拆装来得到零件的装配顺序和装配路径等信息，VDVAS的一个重要特征在于，可通过集成虚拟设计与虚拟装配过程，使设计者能在一个集成的虚拟环境中修改零件几何（假如在装配过程中发现零件存在设计缺陷的话）。     

Solid-based CAPP for surface micromachined MEMS devices

Process planning for a MEMS device is almost always conducted manually by the designer to date. As the structures of MEMS devices become more and more complicated, in order to release the designers from the hard and tedious work and speed up the development of MEMS products, such a situation should be changed. In this study, a solid based CAPP method for surface micromachined MEMS device is presented. With this method, a MEMS device is designed with a traditional CAD system, and its process planning is conducted automatically based on the solid model created. The process features with engineering semantics are extracted first. Then, the process layer model is constructed with each process layer of the model being coincident with the fabrication layer of surface micromachining. Finally, the masks are synthesized and the fabrication process is generated. Furthermore, to guarantee the manufacturability of the designed MEMS device, a systematic evaluation method is proposed. The proposed design and CAPP methods enable designers to concentrate on functional and shape design of MEMS devices.     

An Exploratory Study: Supporting Collaborative Multimedia Systems Design

Multimedia systems design generally requires a collaborative effort from a group of designers with a variety of backgrounds and tasks, such as content experts, instructional designers, media specialists, users, and so forth. However, currently available design tools on the market are mainly designed for a single user. Tools intended to support a collaborative design process should coordinate independent activities of individual designers.This research investigated support for work groups engaged in designing multimedia systems. Specifically, it discussed a new collaborative design environment, called the KMS (Knowledge Management System)-based design environment, in which multimedia designers could share their design knowledge freely. Through two experimental groups, the research investigated impacts of the KMS-based design environment on their collaborative design activities (knowledge creating, knowledge securing, knowledge distributing, and knowledge retrieving activities). The research findings showed that the KMS-based design environment was a promising environment for collaborative multimedia systems design. More specifically, the research findings indicated that the KMS-based design environment supported creating, securing, and retrieving knowledge, but it did not support distributing knowledge. In addition, the research found that the social interactions between group members played important roles in the success of the collaborative multimedia systems design and that the KMS-based design environment did not support the socialization of group members. Furthermore, the research found that the inability of the KMS-based design environment to support the socialization was linked to its low performance level in supporting the knowledge distributing activity. The research explored the desired features of a collaborative support tool for multimedia systems design.     

A modeling tool for simulating and design of on-chip network systems

The conception of Network-on-Chip (NoC) presents system designers with a new approach to the design of on-chip inter-connection structures. However, such networks present designers with a large number of design parameters and decisions, many of which are critical to the efficient operation of over-all on-chip system. To aid the design process of complex systems-on-chip, this paper presents a NoC simulation environment that has been developed and implemented using the SystemC transaction-level modeling language. The simulation environment consists of on-chip components as well as traffic generators, which can generate various types of traffic patterns. The simulation environment has also been integrated with the NoC topology generation tool being developed in our group. A set of simulation results demonstrates the types of parameters that can affect the performance of on-chip systems, including topology variations, network latency and achievable throughput. These results also verify the modeling capabilities of the proposed simulation environment.     

覆盖率导向的WTB控制器功能验证方法

随着单芯片集成度的迅速提高,硬件验证在系统设计中占有越来越重要的地位.仅由设计者完成的模块级验证已经不能够保障流片成功率,需要在验证方法学指导下采用多种先进有效的验证技术和工具,帮助设计者尽可能早地发现和修改设计缺陷.本文详细介绍了在验证方法学VMM指导下,基于IEC61375-1标准的规定,设计分层次的验证环境,对绞线式列车总线控制器进行RTL和参考模型联合仿真的功能验证技术.通过可重用VMM库和随机化函数及基于断言的验证方法,编写高效、可重用的验证平台,以提高验证效率和覆盖率.实验表明,采用覆盖率导向的验证方法可有效地减少验证工作量和验证时间,提高验证质量.     

Designing with dialogue charts: a qualitative content analysis of end-user designers' experiences with a software engineering design tool

Abstract. Software engineering tools used by designers are critical to most systems development methodologies, and successful methodologies are critical to improved productivity. However, the way in which designers use and relate to software engineering tools, whether computer assisted or not, has received little attention in the design literature. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into how people perceive the process of using design tools. The study is a qualitative analysis of interview information from participants in a field experiment. Four teams of student designers used various design tools during the development of interactive information systems typical of those that might be developed by sophisticated end-users. The research reported here is an exploratory study aimed at understanding how designers use one of these tools, the dialogue charts. The broad range of purposes included the uses predicted by the reference literature on design. However, the end-user designers also used the tool opportunistically — they found a broader range of tool usage than the literature on design tools predicted. For example, they consistently used the tool as a communications vehicle among different phases of design and development. The results show that the relationships these 'end-user designers' developed with the target tool are expressed in highly emotional language. These attitudes are tightly coupled with the purposes for which the designers use the tool. The methodology uses a field experiment as a treatment and a semistructured interview with a hidden agenda for gathering data. The data analysis techniques draw on the concepts of discovering grounded theory as described by Glaser and Strauss. They further draw on the concepts of qualitative content analysis synthesized by Krippendortf and the qualitative data analysis methods described by Miles and Huberman.     

Multidisciplinary interface model for design of mechatronic systems

The design of mechatronic systems is based on the integration of several disciplines, such as mechanical, electrical and software engineering. How to achieve an integrated multidisciplinary design during the development process of mechatronic systems has attracted the attention of both academia and industry. However, solutions which can fully solve this problem have not been proposed by now. The concept of multidisciplinary interface represents the logical or physical relationship integrating the components of the mechatronic system or the components with their environment. As the design of mechatronic systems is a multidisciplinary work, the multidisciplinary interface model can be considered as one of the most effective supports to aid designers for achieving the integrated multidisciplinary design during the development process. The paper presents a multidisciplinary interface model for design of mechatronic systems in order to enable the multidisciplinary integration among design team members from different disciplines. On the one hand, the proposed model ensures the consistency of interface defined by the designers. On the other hand, it helps the designers to guarantee the different components integrate correctly. The interface model including three concepts: classification, data model and compatibility rules. The multidisciplinary interface model is implemented by a case study based on a 3D measurement system.     

A web services-based multidisciplinary design optimization framework for complex engineering systems with uncertainties

With the increased complexity of complex engineering systems (CES), more and more disciplines, coupled relationships, work processes, design data, design knowledge and uncertainties are involved. Currently, the MDO is facing unprecedented challenges especially in dealing with the CES by different specialists dispersed geographically on heterogeneous platforms with different analysis tools. The product design data integration and data sharing among the participants and the workflow optimization hamper the development and applications of MDO in enterprises seriously. Therefore, a multi-hierarchical integrated product design data model (MiPDM) supporting the MDO in web environment and a web services-based MDO framework considering aleatory and epistemic uncertainties are proposed in this paper. With the enabling technologies including web services, ontology, workflow, agent, XML, and evidence theory, the proposed framework enables the designers geographically dispersed to work collaboratively in the MDO environment. The ontology-based workflow enables the logical reasoning of MDO to be processed dynamically. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype system is developed based on Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and an example of supersonic business jet is demonstrated to verify the web services-based MDO framework.     

A collaborative Design for Usability approach supported by Virtual Reality and a Multi-Agent System embedded in a PLM environment

This paper details a collaborative workstation design approach integrating knowledge based on engineering process, using a Multi-Agent System (MAS) on a Virtual Reality (VR) platform. The MAS supports R&D teams to extract and re-use engineering knowledge so as to improve their efficiency in developing new products. Our research targets the development of a knowledge engineering system integrated into a PLM-Product Life cycle Management-environment linked with virtual reality tools. A PLM is a strategic business approach with a consistent set of methodologies and software solutions. It is meant to promote collaborative creation, management, delivery and proper use of this life cycle definition and information product in multinational companies. This system is used by engineers to carry out projects in a collective way while conveying a defined process. The MAS allows capitalization, and to annotate knowledge according to the actions of the designers inside a PLM environment. Then, this knowledge is used by VR tools to analyze various aspects of the virtual prototype such as manufacturing, maintenance, reliability or ergonomics. Consequently, we use expert knowledge to pilot the design process of a virtual prototype inside a three-dimensional immersive virtual reality platform. In this context, our paper describes our knowledge management approach applied to improve ergonomics and collaborative design in industrial areas.     

Towards the design of intelligent CAD systems: An ontological approach

Although many sophisticated CAD integrated environments have been developed and are currently adopted by enterprises in the design of mechanical parts and components, such kinds of tools should be extended in order to reach higher levels of performance. To this aim, Artificial Intelligence techniques are particularly suitable to provide CAD tools with a sort of “intelligence” typical of human experts. In particular a complex mechanical object to be designed exploiting CAD systems can be considered as an aggregation of simpler components that have to be put together in order to satisfy precise design rules owned by expert designers core knowledge. This paper presents an ontological approach to the problem of representing relationships among step-by-step more complex parts, in order to obtain a final product that fully meets initial requirements.     

Knowledge-based manufacturability assessment: an object-oriented approach

To help the achievement of integrated product and process development, there is a need for tools that can assist designers in creating manufacturable parts with less design routines and tryouts. This paper presents a systematic approach to developing automated manufacturability assessment tools by identifying the functional and informational requirements and proposing an assessment model. The work presented in this paper includes: (1) identification of characteristics and tasks of design for the die-casting process; (2) determination of functional and informational requirements for automatic manufacturability assessment; (3) formalization and modularization of assessment knowledge; and (4) modeling of product definition data to support the assessment. Object-oriented techniques are employed to model the assessment knowledge and manage the complicated and diverse types of product definition data by taking advantage of data abstraction, modularity, inherent concurrence, and the concept of encapsulation and extendibility.