Research Of Computer Aided Design System Supporting Creative Conceputal Design

With the development of information technology, the world economic pattern hasexperienced great change, gradually forming a unified market. Because of the ever sharpnessof the market competition, the expenditure idea has changed a lot. People no longer treatproduct function as the main factor of whether to buy something or not. Much attention hasbeen paid to the attributes of creativity, outline, delightfulness as well as environmentprotection, which stand the important roll in competition. The change of market requirementshas greatly changed the technological roll of CAD in the modern enterprises. The productdesign must combine with the mobile market requirements tightly so as to survive in thecompetitive world.At present, the impetus of the development of new environment to the creative design isas follows:1) It's crucial for the company to produce new product, which is adaptable to sell in theinternational economic competition. The average life-span of international commercials hasreduced to about three years, which makes it necessary for designers to break away traditionalways and make good use of their creativity ability, so as to develop new products in shorttime.2) The springing up of new products further stimulates people's requirements, which notonly expand the choice space for them, but also promote the requirements level of theirs. Theindividual degree has been promoted further.3) The main characteristics for high-tech products are small-scale, multi-kind, multi-size,sophisticated procedure, special and working condition etc. This kind of product is notproduced by traditional ways but by special creative design.As the most important part of product design activity, conceptual design is the crucialstage deciding the performance, cost and creativity of the new product. During conceptualdesign, the design constraint is little so that designers have big free space for creativity.Creativity is a kind of activity which depends greatly on man's intellect. Nothing else canreplace the status of man during design process, such as inspiration, sudden understanding,and intuition and so on. However, because creativity activity is based on enormousknowledge and information, it needs the process of searching, making up and extractinginformation. What's more, with the weakening of the fields limits, creativity is usually theresult of the combination of multi-subject knowledge. Many creative inspirations come fromthe communication of subjects, which makes it impossible for the designers to master all thedesign information. It's an adaptable and effectual way to combine creative activity andcomputer technology, to use computation model and computer tools, to make good use of thehigh-store ability of computer and some visual means, so as to construct a system to inspirethe designers. In recent years, the technique of CAD has been developed greatly, however in mostcases it still has some defects to support conceptual design in that: 1) The traditional CAD technique aims to produce complex, accurate and complete 3Dmodels, and is short of support of design methodologists for providing effective solutions tothe creative problem. 2) The traditional CAD systems aims to detailed design stage, considering no or limitedsupport for conceptual design, which depart the conceptual design from the whole designprocess. When designers work, they first bring out conceptual model using their experienceby hand, then use computer to design the single parts and at last assemble and optimize thedesign to put out the final product. The system is basically a conceptual drawing tool, not anaided design tool. So CAD system cannot support the design activities and only play a role ofan aided drawing tool. 3) Designing process is far natural to the designer, or to the designer's way of thinking.The result of conceptual design and the sketch from the designer cannot be used directly. 4) Lack of consideration of collaborative design and cooperative work process. As oneof the tendency of conceptual designs, conceptual design can be got by collaboration betweenmembers of a group. Collaborative conceptual design includes the collaborative design ofproduct function, principle, layout and shape of different fields and it also includes thecollaboration of different stages, such as the collaboration of clients, designers andmanufacturers. Conceptual design including collaboration and cooperation can integrate allkinds of knowledge needed by design process, especially the design of sophisticatedconceptual one involving multiple subjects. As for the computer aided design system supporting creative conceptual design, the firstproblem to be solved is to provide a rational and effectual frame, based on which designerscan make good use of different kinds of knowledge, methods and previous experience toperform effectual design. Because of the nature of creativity as the thinking state of humanbeing, full automation is almost impossible. The paper introduces multi-agent technology toprovide frame support for the aided conceptual design system. It provides support forcollaboration of design Agents and designers in distributed environment. This technology hasmerits as follows: 1) Accords with real-life design, as the environment adopts the mode of computer aideddesigner work, while designers have the control authority to find the design tactics and designagents have absolute knowledge and decision method to support designers. 2) Promote design reuse in our environment, because we introduce artificial agent, the...