Evolutionary Methods in Design: Discussion

There are numerous approaches to modeling or describing the design process by using formal methods. Different approaches are taken for tackling different tasks or for modeling different aspects of the design process. For example, formal grammars are used for capturing generative tasks or knowledge-based and cased-based reasoning for utilizing domain knowledge or expertise in order to find solutions in a large and complex search space. In recent years evolutionary methods became popular in engineering and computer science for solving hard, and with other methods sometimes intractable problems. They have proven to be successful in such areas where there is little domain knowledge available and the solution needs not to be perfect, just good enough for the particular task.