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A Multiagent Approach to Identifying Innovative Component Selection

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Abstract

Though there is a clear correlation between profitability and innovativeness, the steps that lead to designing a “creative” product are elusive. In order to learn from past design successes, we must identify the impact of design choices on the innovativeness of an entire product. This problem of quantifying the impact of design choices on a final product is analogous to the problem of ‘credit assignment’ in a multiagent system. We use recent advances in multiagent credit assignment to propagate a product’s innovativeness back to its components. To validate our approach we analyze products from the Design Repository, which contains thousands of products that have been decomposed into functions and components. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach by assessing and propagating innovation evaluations of a set of products down to the component level. We then illustrate the usefulness of the gathered component-level innovation scores by illustrating a product redesign.

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References

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation for their support under Grant Nos. CMMI-0928076 and 0927745 from the Engineering Design and Innovation Program and the NSF REU supplement grant CMMI-1033407. Any opinions or findings of this work are the responsibility of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors or collaborators.

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Correspondence to Carrie Rebhuhn .

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Rebhuhn, C., Gilchrist, B., Oman, S., Tumer, I., Stone, R., Tumer, K. (2015). A Multiagent Approach to Identifying Innovative Component Selection. In: Gero, J., Hanna, S. (eds) Design Computing and Cognition '14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14956-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14956-1_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14955-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14956-1

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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