Engineering Design: Representation and Reasoning

Contrary to a lot of popular mythology, the designs of popular products and successful systems do not appear suddenly, or magically. The authors believe that symbolic representation, and related problem-solving methods, offer significant opportunities to clarify and articulate concepts of design to lay a better framework for design research and design education. Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides a substantial body of material concerned with understanding and modeling cognitive processes. This book adopts the vocabulary and paradigms of AI to enhance the presentation and explanation of design. It includes concepts from AI because of their explanatory power and because of their utility as possible ingredients of practical design activity. This second edition has been enriched by the inclusion of recent work on design reasoning, computational design, AI in design, and design cognition, with pointers to a wide cross section of the current literature.

Clive L. Dym is Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design and Director of the Center for Design Education at Harvey Mudd College. His primary interests are in engineering design and structural mechanics. He is the author of several books including Engineering Design: A Synthesis of Views (1994), Structural Modeling and Analysis (1997), Principles of Mathematical Modeling, Second Edition (2004) and Engineering Design: A Project Based Introduction, co-authored with Patrick Little (2008). He has published more than 90 refereed journal articles and is the founding editor of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing. He has served on the editorial boards of several other journals, including the ASME's Journal of Mechanical Design.

David C. Brown is Professor of Computer Science and has a collaborative appointment as Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is also affiliated with the Manufacturing, Robotics and Learning Sciences programs. His research interests include computational models of engineering design and the applications of artificial intelligence to engineering and manufacturing. He has published Design Problem Solving: Knowledge Structures and Control Strategies, co-authored with B. Chandrasekaran (1990) and Intelligent Computer Aided Design, co-edited with M. B. Waldron and H. Yoshikawa (1992). From 2001 to 2011, he was the Editor in Chief of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing and has been on the editorial boards of Concurrent Engineering: Research and Application; Research in Engineering Design and The International Journal of Design Computing.