The Rutgers CAP Project Design Associate

Thomas Ellman
John Keane
Mark Schwabacher

Department of Computer Science
Rutgers University
Hill Center for Mathematical Sciences
New Brunswick, New Jersey  08903
{ellman,keane,schwabac}@cs.rutgers.edu

CAP-TR-7

The Design Associate is intended to be an interactive environment that
supports decision-making, performance evaluation, design-record
management and knowledge acquisition tasks.  The system is
specifically intended to handle the design of complex, physical
structures, such as ships and planes, among others.  Two key
difficulties characterize this class of design problems: (1) Design
goals depend on global properties of an artifact. (2) Evaluation of
the performance of an artifact is computationally expensive.  The
Design Associate provides a set of tools for attacking each of these
problems: Global constraints are attacked by methods of automatically
abstracting and decomposing search spaces.  Computational costs of
evaluation are attacked by methods of intelligently selecting
evaluation models at varying levels of approximation.  Future work
will extend the Design Associate by building a Model Associate for
automatically generating new performance evaluation models. This
extension is intended to support innovative design by diminishing the
time and monetary costs of developing new models needed to evaluate
radically new designs.  Research on the Design Associate is expected
to contribute to the field of Computer-Aided Design by formalizing the
generic task structure of complex, physical structure design. It is
also expected to contribute to the field of Artificial Intelligence,
by attacking problems such as search control, search space
formulation, abstraction, decomposition, model selection and model
formation.