Erasure in Design Space Exploration

Design space explorers support designers through the metaphor of exploration, a guided movement through a space of possibilities. A subsumption-based design space explorer structures the space in which it navigates by a relation of information specificity. In particular, it conditions its exploration operators so that they move in predictable ways in the underlying space of designs. We have extended the formal system of typed features structures to support subsumption-based design space exploration. This paper discusses the exploration operators available when subsumption-based design space explorers are implemented in typed feature structures. Of particular interest is the handling of erasure, where the constraint on generative operators to be monotonic wrt information specificity leads to a surprisingly clean view of erasure.

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