Matthew Campbell and Jonathan Cagan
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213-3890
Kenneth Kotovsky
Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
A new automated approach to engineering design known as A-Design is presented that creates design configurations through the interaction of software agents. By combining unique problem solving strategies, these agents are able to generate solutions to open-ended design problems. The A-Design methodology makes several theoretical claims through its combination of multi-agent systems, multi-objective design selection, and stochastic optimization, and is currently implemented to solve general electro-mechanical design problems. While this paper presents an overview of the theoretical basis for A-Design, it primarily focuses on the method for representing electro-mechanical design configurations and the reasoning of the agents that construct these configurations. Results from an electro-mechanical test problem show the generality of the functional representation.