Initial design strategies for iterative design

This paper discusses methods to retrieve designs from a design library in order to achieve a better initial starting point for the iterative model of the design process. The motivation for doing this is to reduce the extensive analysis time required for many iterative design problems. Starting a design at a favorable initial point should help reduce the number of iterations. Four initial design methods have been investigated, varying from a simple nonlibrary method to methods that use designs from a library. The iterative design scheme used is conventional hill-climbing. To evaluate the effectiveness of these methods, the initial design methods were tested on four example problems. They are, a cantilever beam, a gear-pair, a V-belt, and an extruder-die. It was found that the number of iterations reduced approximately to the order of 1/n [referred in the rest of the article as O (1/n)], wheren is the number of stored values in the design library.