Reasoning about designs through frequent patterns mining

This paper deals with reasoning about designs based on their internal structures in the form of attributed hypergraphs. A database containing hypergraphs representing solutions of similar design tasks is searched for frequently occurring subgraphs. On the basis of search results the quality of newly created solutions is evaluated. Moreover the syntactic reasoning rules are specified by the designer on the basis of the design knowledge concerning a given task and used to evaluate hypergraphs representing new solutions.