Design rules application in manufacturing industries: a state of the art survey and proposal of a context-aware approach

In manufacturing industries, the design of a product needs to comply with many design rules. These rules are essentials as they help industrial designers to create high quality designs in an efficient way. [Problem] However, the management of an ever-increasing number of design rules becomes a real problem, especially for novice designers. Even if there exists some knowledge engineering tools for managing design rules, their capabilities are still limited and many companies continue to store their design rules in unstructured documents. Nowadays, the application of design rules remains a difficult task that needs a circular validation process between many experts in a manufacturing company. [Proposition] In this paper, we will analyze the main existing approaches for the application of design rules and we will demonstrate the need of a new approach to improve the current state-of-the-art practices. To minimize rule application impact on the design process, we propose to develop a Context-Aware Design Assistant that will recommend design rules on the fly while using computer-aided design software. Our design assistant relies on the modelling of the design rules and the design context in a single knowledge graph that can fuel a recommendation engine. [Future Work] In future work, we will describe the technical structure of the Context-Aware Design Assistant and develop it. The potential outcome of this research are: a better workflow integration of design rules application, a proactive verification of design solutions, a continuous learning of design rules and the detection and automation of design routines.