"43" - A Generic Approach for Engineering Design Grammars

In the past grammars have already been successfully applied for computational synthesis in several technical domains. A drawback of most approaches however has been the fact that the grammar rules were formulated and implemented for a specific application domain. This strategy results in a lack of generalisation and restricts the use of the grammar compiler to the application domain it has been developed for. To overcome this limitation a generic approach for engineering design grammars is implemented into a software tool for engineering design named "43". The generic character of the „43“ engineering design compiler software is achieved by separating the formal design process into two steps: The formulation of graph grammar rules and the transfer from the generic graph layer to a domain specific material layer by a interpretation step which allows the subsequent generation of several final model descripitions which can be processed by common engineering analysis tools.