ABSTRACT
The engineering design process consists of different, though not entirely distinct, stages such as the conceptual design phase, the preliminary design phase, analysis, design, detailing and drafting, and so on. This chapter discusses the generic nature of the approach to conceptual design as design synthesis. It shows the use of design synthesis to be efficient for dealing with specialised design subtasks such as proposing a set of feasible solutions and it provides a powerful methodology for building flexible knowledge-based systems. The chapter describes a software tool, GENSYNT, for design synthesis and illustrates the use of GENSYNT through examples. Design synthesis involves the generation of one or more design solutions consistent with the requirements defined during formulation of the design problem and any additional requirements identified during synthesis. Transformation, like case-based reasoning, adopts a holistic approach to design, but unlike case-based reasoning which uses specific episodes, it uses generalisations.
