Interaction elements: utilizing knowledge to provide high quality information in a decision support system

The design activity involves many decisions, which must be made based on a wide range of information and knowledge. Information systems have the potential to provide the designer with information, however the quality in which this information is provided to the designer is still an issue that requires more attention. Constraints, which represent part of the knowledge involved in the design of a product, can provide a significant help in narrowing the choices to be made by designers, and supporting the design decision making process with quality information. The concept of product model has been an approach applied to support co-operation across product development within a CE environment. However, to support design decisions with quality and more consistently, additional types of information and knowledge need to be captured within this approach. This paper discusses the use of an additional information and knowledge model, called a Product Range Model, which captures design constraints supporting the design decision making process with quality information. The concept of Interaction Elements is presented, as well as their relationships with possible design solutions to support product functional design. An object-oriented approach has been applied providing a relatively simple structure to deal with the capture of constraints, as well as allowing the reuse of these elements for different design criteria. The work has used injection mould tooling as an appropriate product range to explore the ideas developed evaluated through the design and implementation of a design reuse support system utilizing an object-oriented database