This paper presents a novel formulation of the configuration-design problem that achieves the benefits of the concurrent engineering (CE) design paradigm. In CE, all design concerns (manufacturability, testability, etc.) are applied to an evolving design throughout the design cycle. CE identifies conflicts early on, avoids costly redesign, and leads to better products. Our formulation is based on a distributed dynamic interval constraint-satisfaction problem (DDICSP) model. Persistent catalog agents map onto DDICSP variables and constraint agents map onto DDICSP constraints. These agents use a set of operations and heuristics to navigate the design space to eliminate sets of designs until a solution is found. Experimental results show that an architecture where each catalog agent resides on a separate computer has performance advantages over nondistributed approaches.

Design has been extensively studied by artificial intelligence researchers for many years. These studies have resulted in a large number of design tools that perform interesting tasks. Understanding the capabilities of these tools is, however, very difficult, which seriously impedes progress in the field. A better understanding of different tools can be achieved by analyzing the knowledge use of existing tools. Such an analysis of six configuration design tools is presented. This results in a model of configuration design that shows significant similarity in the tasks performed by these tools.

Current design practices mandate that engineering designs be evaluated based on multiple attributes, e.g., cost, power, and area. For multiattribute design problems, generation and evaluation of the Pareto optimal set guarantees the optimal design will be found, but is not practical for a large class of problems. Iterative techniques can be applied to most problems, but sacrifice optimality. In this paper, we introduce a new technique that extends the set of design problems that can be solved optimally. By first constructing an imprecise value function, the number of nondominated alternatives that must be generated is reduced. We describe an implementation based on combinatorial optimization and constraint satisfaction which achieves additional performance gains by decomposing the value function to identify dominated design-variable assignments. Test results indicate that our approach extends the set of problems that can be solved optimally.

A natural question is why AI in design? Although the design applications written about in the journal vary widely, the common thread is that researchers use AI techniques to implement their ideas. The use of AI techniques for design applications, at least when AI EDAM was started, was partially a reaction against the predominant design methods based on some form of optimization. Knowledge-based techniques, particularly rule-based systems of various sorts, were very popular. One of the draws of these methods, I believe, was their ability to represent knowledge that is hard or awkward to represent in traditional optimization frameworks. This mirrors my experience: at the time, I was working in configuration with components that had a large number compatibility and resource constraints. Although many constraints could be represented in mixed integer linear programming systems, it was not easy to conceptualize, write, and most importantly, maintain the constraints in those systems.

In part-selection problems, parts are selected from catalogs and connected to meet the following problem requirements: functionality, specifications, and constraints. This paper formally defines the part-selection problem, enumerates a set of design properties that are useful during a search for a design solution, and provides an algorithm for solving part-selection problems based on a novel set of operators for manipulating portions of the design space.

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.