Design synthesis approach based on process decomposition to design reuse

Abstract

Design reuse is becoming a widely accepted strategy to meet the increasingly fierce competition in product development. This paper presents a new approach to design reuse based on the decomposition of design processes. In this approach, the basic reusable template, design process unit (DPU), is developed by decomposing the design process, which has four important characteristics: reusability, hierarchical decomposition and composition, domain independence, and decision-centric with well-defined inputs and outputs. Then the criteria of process decomposition and the scale of design process reuse are established, respectively. Based on the methodology above, a multi-tier, three-phase reuse architecture with effective DPU retrieval is presented. Experimental results show that this approach greatly facilitates DPU reuse and is a worthwhile exploration of design reuse.

Keywords:

• design reuse
• process decomposition
• design process unit