Project Details
Projekt
HYDRA – Hybrid Decision Support for Computer Aided Design
Subject Area
Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543078746
Mechanical design is a complex and manifold task where a large and heterogeneous set of requirements and specifications must be considered, e.g., mechanical response to static and dynamic loads, durability, safety, aesthetics, environmental impact, maintenance, costs, or recyclability. Many of these aspects are not suitable to be modeled and translated into mathematical relationship, which makes fully or partially automated design very difficult. Human intuition and experience are still of paramount importance for a successful design, so that conventional, human-based engineering techniques will keep playing a central role in mechanical design also in the future. At the present state-of-the-art, the engineer is typically supported by a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software product. With progress in computer and data science (DS), particularly in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), it becomes promising to complement the interaction of the designer with the CAD system in the spirit of hybrid decision support to ease the design process and assist in fulfilling the various requirements. This leads to our idea of a Hybrid Decision Support system (HYDRA) for Computer-Aided Design, in which the established methods of mechanical design, represented by a human Engineer, meets the DS/AI-based skills of the so-called Completer. The Completer, powered by a transformer architecture, is trained on a large number of real designs, which implicitly contain various common design requirements. It incrementally guides the Engineer towards the final design and receives, in turn, advices from him to focus and specify its contribution. This interaction is enabled through an interactive Overlay. Within this interaction, the Engineer can, for example, mark certain areas or elements of the geometry to remain unchanged (frozen) in the overlay as an advice. This and other advices are then fed back to the Completer along with the current geometry of the design to be created, which then suggests the next completion step. The Overlay showcases the geometry before and after each completion step, offering a range of tools for the Engineer to articulate further advices and for progressing, ranging from fully accepting the Completer’s suggestion, over requesting specific modifications to the geometry, to independently continuing with the design process. Therefore, the Engineer is still free in creating mechanical designs while he or she is supported by the Completer. This makes expectedly the design process faster, stressless, and more effective, especially for novice designers, by easing the fulfillment of requirements and reducing the efforts on regular, repetitive, or monotonous steps.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
Subproject of
SPP 2443:
Hybrid decision support in product creation
