The introduction of a design heuristics extraction method

This paper introduces a novel method for analyzing conceptual design data. Given a database of previous designs, this method identifies relationships between design components within this database. Further, the method transforms these relationships into explicit design knowledge that can be used to generate a ‘heuristic-based’ model of the design domain for use at the conceptual stage. This can be viewed as a knowledge extracting method for the conceptual design stage. Such a method is particularly interesting, as the conceptual stage typically lacks explicit models to describe the trade-offs that must be made when designing. The method uses either principal components analysis or self-organizing maps to identify the relationships, and this paper describes all the elements required by the method to successfully extract and verify design knowledge from design databases.