A Model of Design Representation and Synthesis

To represent the increasingly complex designs being produced today, we have developed a unified model of design representation that uses three hierarchical, non-isomorphic domains of description that can be coordinated to represent the entire design. Each of these domains contains multiple levels of abstraction; both the domains and the levels are described in detail in this paper. We then show how this model of design representation can be used as a model of design synthesis. It is hoped that this work will lead to a better understanding of design representation and its relationship to the synthesis process.