Aided Decision-Making for an Embodiment Design Problem

In the early phases of a traditional design process, many decisions are made by designers. For that purpose, they take advantage of their experience and company knowledge. These decisions are necessary in a sequential design process but may hide many embodiment solutions. Moreover, designers often use a trial-and-error mode to find a working combination of standard elements. To overcome these difficulties, a decision support system based on constraint programming is proposed. The object of the design process set out in this paper is to facilitate the embodiment design phase by avoiding a-priori decision making and searching for feasible architectures in which all the points of view of the various participants in the project are taken into account. A preliminary search of structuring characteristics of the design problem is necessary and is detailed here. This methodology is applied to embodiment design of the automatic weight-winding system of a monumental clock. To determine the most interesting solutions , objectives and performance indicators are entered. Finally, the benefits of our approach are discussed.

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