An affordance-integrated approach for design knowledge reuse

Abstract

Design knowledge reuse is regarded as an effective strategy for design organizations to develop products with shorter time and less effort. However, existing design reuse approaches primarily focus on reusing the geometrical information of similar parts, with a wealth of contextual knowledge behind detailed design results lost. This paper presents an affordance-integrated approach for the reuse of detailed design knowledge, which can be employed to help designers determine the values of geometrical design parameters. First, this paper introduces an affordance-integrated model, called the structure-behavior-affordance, to represent the detailed design information. Then an affordance-based approach is proposed to help designers reuse the detailed design knowledge, which is also integrated with commercial CAD tools. Finally, the proposed approach is implemented as a detailed design knowledge reuse system and a turbocharger shell fixture is adopted as an example to illustrate the proposed design knowledge reuse approach.