D-APPS

In engineering design, an unconscious phenomenon known as design fixation assails engineers attempting to find solutions to design problems. When exposed to past examples that satisfy a certain set of design requirements, engineers tend to replicate similar forms or functionality into their new designs.

The design-by-analogy concept has been shown to be successful in mitigating the repetitive effects of design fixation while providing novel solutions. Design-by-analogy is a mechanism for finding additional sources of innovation across varying domains based on problem definition. Analogical case studies have established the potential for greater innovations in forthcoming designs. This work approaches a novel manner for retrieving analogies based upon a developed framework of performance parameters in the attempt to alleviate design fixation.

Among the several design-by-analogy tools, there is no analogy “search engine” that returns analogies to the engineer based on the specific performance parameters of a design problem. The Design Analogy Performance Parameter System (D-APPS) is an effort to create an analogy-retrieval tool and in turn offers an opportunity to develop such a search engine that capitalizes on previous research. D-APPS is an effort to build an analogy-retrieval tool that utilizes both a design repository and software package based on functional modelling and bond graphs. This novel mathematical approach of pairing bond graphs and engineering performance parameters with graph theory allows functions to return feasible analogy solutions as suggestions to the engineer.