The collection of papers that follow this Editorial (beginning on page 43) come from the symposium “Computing Futures in Engineering Design” that was held on the campus of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, on May 2–3, 1997. The symposium focused on future roles of computing in doing design and engineering and in the teaching of design and engineering. The intention of the symposium organizer, Clive Dym, was to provide useful insight, advice, and information to educators about how they might think about the future of design in engineering education.

One of the biggest problems in pneumatic system design is over design. Thus, the results are excessive in costs of the initial investment and it requires too much energy. This article describes the development of expert system based pneumatic design system, PNEUDES (PNEUmatic Design Expert System), prototype that enables the user the optimal design of pneumatic system. Once the design requirements such as cylinder type and work load, etc. are input to the system, optimal cylinder specifications with standardized order-based size, valves types, and necessary accessories are all determined. Also the configuration information such as the connectivity among components and cylinder image data are supplied to the user. It can also help the novice of pneumatic design. The rule-based reasoning approach is used as a reasoning strategy with Intelligent Rule Element shell.

This article contains a description of a constraint solver that determines complete solution spaces. These spaces are defined by sets of constraints in continuous variables. Interactive design is supported through improvements to existing algorithms that have increased system performance. In addition, heuristics for activating the best set of preferred constraints for a design task are presented, and two ways are proposed for interactively exploring design alternatives. IDIOM is an application framework that has successfully tested these algorithms for interactive apartment layout design.

As manufacturing systems become more sophisticated and complicated, effective managers know how they play a crucial role in managing an enterprise and managers know how to deal with their dynamics and uncertainty. In this article, a formalism based on the computer-integrated manufacturing open-system architecture (CIMOSA) reference model is presented to specify the business processes and enterprise activities at the knowledge level. The formalism uses an integration of multiple types of knowledge, including precise, muddy, and random symbolic and numerical knowledge to systematically represent enterprise behavior and functionality. To support the modelling process, a prototype is developed and an example for a maintenance activity is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper is intended to be the opening salvo of the workshop, Computing Futures in Engineering Design (Dym, 1997). Thus, I want to take this privileged moment to ask you to think with me about the role of design in engineering. In particular, I want to reflect upon how design is articulated and how design is taught; about the role of design in engineering education and in the practice of engineering; and about the role that could be played locally and, perhaps, nationally by a center devoted to design education. Because I teach here at Harvey Mudd College (HMC), and because most of you are visitors, I will place my remarks in our context by telling you about what we do here and how that doing has shaped my thinking.

The important questions for instructors to address concern what skills the student is to learn and how the student is to be motivated to acquire those skills. Questions about simulations, graphics tools, and the like are unimportant until the first two questions have been answered adequately. We discuss the role of explanation by students and describe a mechanism for motivating students to learn.

While there are many project management tools and software packages available, these are not widely used in the design curriculum at colleges and universities. This may reflect some of the differences between conventional projects and design activities. In particular, the open-ended nature of design activities and the need to clarify the client's intention may lead to the conclusion that conventional project management tools are only useful for the most routine activities in the design process. It is suggested that there is a market for a new set of tools for teaching the management of design. These tools should incorporate the most useful of the current management tools and integrate them with some of the requirements of effective design, including support for clarification of objectives, functional analysis, and generation and evaluation of alternatives.

This article addresses the issue of educating undergraduate engineering students in the appropriate use of computer simulation in the design process. The premise that poorly designed assignments involving simulation can actually impair understanding is addressed. A set of goals for simulation-based exercises is suggested, and some tactics for meeting these goals are introduced. Finally, a specific example of a half-term assignment that is used to meet these goals is provided for illustration.

The thesis presented here is that the result of engineering is the design, construction, or operation of systems or their subsystems and components and that the teaching of systems must be central to engineering education. It is maintained that current undergraduate engineering curricula do not give the student adequate appreciation of this major intellectual element of their profession. Five proposals for approaches to correct this deficiency are offered: opportunities for clinical practice throughout all the undergraduate years; the use of distributed interactive simulation technology in semester-long projects; courses or course material on the phenomenology and behavior of systems; use of project management tools in engineering clinics; and encouraging engineering faculty to spend some part of their sabbaticals engaged in system design or operation. Issues of implementation are addressed, including the scaling of these ideas to universities that must meet the needs of large numbers of students.

Within the last 20 years, much research and development has been conducted to deliver computer tools to assist engineers in performing their tasks. We are now experiencing the power of worldwide networked computing environments and the ability to easily share large quantities of information over geographically dispersed environments. However, are the computing environments available today supporting engineers in doing their job or defining how they must do their job? We need to develop systems that are more transparent and understandable to the users and that are more responsive to the individual needs and idiosyncrasies of the persons using these assistants.

This position paper proposes the P5BL initiative and vision, that is, Problem-, Project-, Product-, Process-, People-Based Learning. A definition is proposed for the P5BL teaching and learning approach. The discussion identifies key pedagogical issues and innovative roles of computing for each of the five critical Ps in a multisite, cross-disciplinary, project-centered, and team-oriented Architecture/Engineering/Construction environment.

The article is an extended version of the verbal summary presented at the concluding lunch of the workshop on “Computing Futures in Engineering Design.” In the paper, the first person is used to differentiate my observations or reactions from the summaries of the speakers' presentations. The common themes that emerge during the workshop are: the need to set the discipline-specific context before computational tools are used; the incompatibilities between point tools that hinder their use; the paramount importance of teamwork; and the need to understand and treat design as a social process.

Hewlett-Packard develops and markets a family of computer-aided engineering products used by high-frequency designers to model the signal path in contemporary communications systems. As design frequencies, clock speeds and packaging densities continue to increase, more designers are finding that system and circuit simulation products need to be complemented by electromagnetic simulation software to develop models for basic circuit functionality or to characterize and compensate undesired parasitic effects. The HP High-Frequency Structure Simulator (HP HFSS) is a frequency-domain, finite element-based simulator, which enables engineers to characterize high-frequency behavior in 2D (transmission lines) and arbitrary 3D structures. Links with mechanical computer aided design (CAD) software have also become more important as the 3D structures to be analyzed by HP HFSS can involve packaging parasitics when the housing in which the electrical circuitry is enclosed becomes an influence on the signal path. Depending upon the complexity of the structure to be analyzed, HP HFSS can require hundreds of Mbytes of RAM and disk during automated adaptive solution convergence processes which determine field and circuit parameter solution results to user-specified accuracies. Although computer resource requirements will always be an important consideration for users of this type of product, another important situation to address for the future involves the exchange of data between the different simulation and modelling tools required to take design from concept through simulation to manufacture. The introduction of physical simulation tools into the traditional circuit simulation arena changes the design process flow and increases the demand for improved integration and interoperability of circuit simulators, numerical EM simulators, and mechanical CAD software. This paper provides an overview of data exchange issues in high-frequency electrical–physical–mechanical design processes.

Rapid development and delivery of high-performance, high-quality new products is the key to survival and success for many firms in today's high technology, global marketplace. However, shrinking time to market for complex, high technology products can be extremely difficult and costly. Even the most successful engineering managers have experienced the escalating costs of overtime, coordination and rework that are so common in fast-track, high technology, product development efforts; and they know the quality problems that can result when coordination breaks down in the face of aggressive—often “impossible”—development schedules.

I would like to begin with a list of some of the things that are happening today in the arena of engineering design and how it is to be taught.

In the late 1980s someone in the CAD software arena coined the phrase in the main title. A decade passed by and the appealing idea is still not realized. Is it ever going to be or is there an inherent fallacy in the idea? The following is the author's position on the subject, admittedly biased by a structural engineering background.

The intellectual content and social activity of engineering product development are a constant source of surprise, excitement, and challenge for engineers. When our students experience product-based-learning (PBL), they experience this excitement (Brereton et al., 1995). They also have fun and perform beyond the limits required for simple grades. We, their teachers, experience these things too. Why, then, are so few students and faculty getting the PBL message? How, then, can we put the excitement back in engineering education? In part, we think this is because of three persistent mistakes in engineering education:

1. We focus on individual students.

2. We focus on engineering analysis versus communication between engineers.

3. We fail to integrate thinking skills in engineering science and engineering practice.