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Symposium Design for Usability 2009
Original situation
Smart Synthesis Tools situation
The current analysis tools can be used to determine that a design does not meet the specifications, but they don’t provide alternatives. This means that you must always come up with new solutions yourself, only to be told by the tool that they don’t work. This costs a lot of time. Experienced designers can do it faster as they have experience and use rules of thumb, but it is not an ideal situation. This is because the tool does not go further than providing a statement about behaviour. The aim is to develop a program that proposes a number of feasible solutions as early as the draft phase on the basis of the desired behaviour of a product, in other words, a synthesis tool.
heavily influence each other. This means that several specialists are required to find a solution together, which is a time-consuming process. This is because the integration of partial solutions does not always result in a working system, not to mention an ideal system.
Four subjects For decades, the Twente department of OPM has been conducting research into computerbased tools that support designers and engineers. Recently, prototypes were built for various areas of expertise which show the feasibility and positive effects of a synthesis tool, like the design of a pick-and-place robot. This is an issue whereby mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and process control
A synthesis tool is used to specify the desired behaviour of the product as a whole. The tool provides a number of solutions, ordered by quality level. To increase the application possibilities of the synthesis technology that has already been developed, this project involves research in four subareas. The first one is domain integration, which is required for design pathways whereby knowledge from various areas of expertise has to be integrated in the draft phase. The second subject is support for design structuring. A complex problem is first solved roughly as a whole, after which detailed solutions are generated for each of the partial problems. The system must be able to specify partial problems automatically and integrate the partial solutions. The third subarea is aimed at the use of expert knowledge to generate solutions in a targeted manner and have the