Colloquia

Samenvatting

All the design projects of today’s generation are complex to design and multidisciplinary in nature. The engineers often rely on design approaches or guidelines to navigate the design problem to a solution. Traditionally, a point-based design approach is followed where a conceptual design is developed by adjusting the design parameters until an optimal solution is obtained. However, a set-based design approach can be adopted where the multiple designs are generated and narrowed down in steps before converging on to a final design. In both approaches, the designer uses his Intuition or gut feeling to provide information on certain design parameters that are assumed or guessed to create a design. A novice designer experiences poor quality of Intuition due to lack of experience and knowledge in the design domain and is likely to provide inaccurate information resulting in non-optimal solutions. In contrast, an experienced designer possesses good quality of Intuition that results in optimum solutions in both the design approaches.

At University of Twente, a Design space exploration tool (DSET) has been developed that adopts Computational Design Synthesis and Set-based concurrent engineering principles to generate multiple solutions for a  complex design problem based on the requirements. DSET tool has the advantage of creating bigger solution spaces but is still limited as the design parameters required to generate solutions depend on the accurate information provided by the designer.

The thesis aims to study the Intuition experienced by designers and formulate a method to capture and implement the Intuition in DSET. The literature review on Intuition and methods to model Intuition was conducted. The outcome of the study resulted in the development of tool that uses Beta Distribution and its functions to model the Intuition of designers. A design case of Planetary gear transmission system was considered for testing the Intuition Model and its influence on the solution space of DSET. A knowledge base was created in DSET containing the parameters and equations necessary for designing the Planetary gear transmission system.

Two Intuition sets were modeled, one containing novice designer’s Intuition and the other containing experienced designer’s Intuition. A total of 8 design scenarios were considered, and designs were generated for each scenario with and without Intuition. Later, the solution space of each scenario for the two Intuition sets was compared and analyzed. The assessment outcome showed that the solution space had more favorable solutions when the right Intuition was used to generate the solutions