43 — A General Approach for Engineering Design Grammars

Computational Synthesis: From Basic Building Blocks to High Level Functionality

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

In the past grammars have already been successfully applied for computational synthesis in several technical domains. A drawback of most approaches however has been the fact that the grammar rules were formulated and implemented for a specific application domain. This strategy results in a lack of generalisation and restricts the use of the grammar compiler to the application domain it has been developed for. To overcome this limitation a generic approach for engineering design grammars is implemented into a software tool for engineering design named "43". The generic character of the "43" engineering design compiler software is achieved by separating the formal design process into two steps: The formulation of graph grammar rules and the transfer from the generic graph layer to a domain specific material layer by a interpretation step which allows the subsequent generation of several final model descripitions which can be processed by common engineering analysis tools.