A computational concept generation technique for biologically-inspired, engineering design

Abstract

The natural world provides numerous cases for analogy and inspiration in engineering design. During the early stages of design, particularly during concept generation when several variants are created, nature can be used to inspire innovative solutions to a design problem. However, identifying and presenting the valuable knowledge from the biological domain to an engineering designer during concept generation is currently a somewhat disorganized process or requires extensive knowledge of a particular method. The proposed research aims to define and formalize the information identification and knowledge transfer processes, which will enable systematic development of biologically-inspired, engineering designs. The computational framework for discovering biological inspiration during function-based design activities is presented and discussed through an illustrative example.