Dominic I: Progress toward domain independence in design by iterative redesign

This paper describes the first working version of a program called Dominic that performs design by iterative redesign in a domain-independent manner. The paper describes in detail the program's strategy, which stresses the concept of redesign dependencies to guide its redesign process. Dominic has been successfully tested in four different domains. Its performance on two of these (v-belt drive design and design of extruded heat sinks) is presented here. The redesign class of design problems on which Dominic works is that large class of problems that are intellectually manageable and solvable without subdivision into smaller parts. This includes the various subproblems ultimately created when large complex problems are decomposed for solution. Dominic is a hill-climbing algorithm, similar in this respect to standard optimization methods. However, its problem formulation or input language is more flexible for some design applications than optimization techniques. Work is continuing on a Dominic II in an effort to overcome some of the limitations of Dominic.