Supporting Constraint-Aided Conceptual Design from First Principles in Autodesk Inventor

Engineering conceptual design can be defined as that phase of the product development process during which the designer takes a specification for a product to be designed and generates many broad solutions for it. It is well recognized that few computational tools exist that are capable of supporting the designer work through the conceptual phase of design. This paper presents a prototype constraint-based computer-aided design (CAD) technology, developed as an add-in to Autodesk Inventor, which can be used to support designers working in the early stages of design. The prototype has, at its core, a constraint filtering system based on generalized arc-consistency processing and backtrack search. We present aspects of our current prototype, focusing in particular on those aspects related to the interactive specification, development and configuration of the designer’s concepts from an initial high-level specification.