Skip to main content

DRCS: An Integrated System for Capture of Designs and Their Rationale

  • Chapter

Abstract

In current design practice, the rationale for design decisions is captured, if at all, as a collection of paper documents, project and personal notebook entries as well as designer’s recollections, and is maintained distinctly from the description of the design itself. Increasing demands for higher product quality and lower cost, the growing complexity of the artifacts we design as well as the highly distributed nature of modern manufacturing enterprises is making it increasingly critical that design rationale be captured in a highly usable form, and in particular one that allows us to harness the power of computers to support our activities. Existing rationale capture systems, however, have important limitations: they are either not oriented specifically towards the design process or use a representation not easily generalizable to the full range of potential design problems. This document presents a rationale capture language and system that transcends these limitations by being able to capture designs and their rationale in an integrated way.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  • Balzer, R.: 1984, Capturing the design process in the machine, Rutgers Workshop on Knowledge-Based Design Aids.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baudin, C., Sivard, C. and Zweben, M. A.: 1989, Model-based approach to design rationale conservation, IJCAI-89 Workshop on Model-Based Reasoning.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blanchard, B. S. and Fabrycky, W. J.: 1981, Systems Engineering and Analysis, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boose, J. H., J. M. B. and Shema, D. B.: 1991, A decision support system for automating engineering trade studies, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, D. C. and Chandrasekaran, B.: 1984, Expert systems for a class of mechanical design activity, in J. S. Gero (ed.), Knowledge Engineering in Computer-Aided Design, North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp. 259–282.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, D. C.: 1985, Failure Handling In A Design Expert System, Butterworth.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chapman, D.: 1985, Planning for conjunctive goals, Technical Report, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Google Scholar 

  • Conklin, J. and Begeman, M. L.: 1987, gIBIS: A hypertext tool for team design deliberation, Proceedings of Hypertext 87, pp. 247–251.

    Google Scholar 

  • Faragher-Horwell, R., Murphy, A. R., Nguyen, T. P., Purdon, D. J., Small, D. H. and Sharma, K. J.: 1990, Automated Process Planning (APP) domain independent shell design issues: Year End Report, Technical Report BCS-G20I0-98, Boeing Proprietary, The Boeing Company, March.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fedrizzi, M., Kacpryzk, J. and Zadrozny, S.: 1988, An Interactive Multi-User Decision Support System For Consensus Reaching Process Using Fuzzy Logic With Linguistic Quantifiers, Elsevier Science Publishers, Vol. 4, pp. 313–327.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fischer, G., McCall, R. and Morch, A.: 1989, Design environments for constructive and argumentative design, Proceedings of CHI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fischer, G., Lemke, A. C., McCall, R. and Morch, A. I.: 1991, Making argumentation serve design, Journal of Human Computer Interaction.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gruber, T. R. and Cohen, P. R.: 1987, Design for acquisition: Principles of knowledge-system design to facilitate knowledge acquisition, IJMSS 26, 143–159.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gruber, T. R.: 1991, Learning why by being told what, IEEE Expert.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kleer, J. D.: 1985, Choices without backtracking, AAAI-85, pp. 79–85.

    Google Scholar 

  • Klein, M. and Lu, S. C. Y.: 1991, Insights into cooperative group design: experience with the LAN designer system, in G. Rzevski and R. A. Adey (eds), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering (AIENG ′91), University of Oxford, UK, pp.143–162.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Klein, M.: 1991: Supporting conflict resolution in cooperative design systems, IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics 21 (6).

    Google Scholar 

  • Lakin, F., Wambaugh, J., Leifer, L., Cannon, D. and Sivard, C.: 1989, The electronic design notebook: Performing medium and processing medium, Visual Computer 5 (4), 214–226.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, J.: 1990, Sibyl: A tool for managing group decision rationale, Proceedings of CSCW 90, pp. 79–92.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lee, J. and Lai, K. Y.: 1991, What’s in design rationale?. Human-Computer Interaction.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacLean, A., Young, R. M., Bellotti, V. and Moran, T.: 1989, Design rationale: The argument behind the artifact, Proceedings of CHI, Austin TX.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacLean, A., Young, R., Bellotti, V. and Moran, T.: 1991, Questions, options and criteria: elements of a design rationale for user interfaces, Journal of Human Computer Interaction: Special Issue on Design Rationale.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, S., Stout, J. and McDermott, J.: 1987, VT: An expert elevator designer, Artificial Intelligence Magazine 8 (4), 39–58.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mark, W. and Schlossberg, J.: 1990, Design memory, Proceedings of the Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems Workshop.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCall, R.: 1987, PHIBIS: Procedurally heirarchical issue-based information systems, Proceedings of Conference on Planning and Design in Architecture.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mcdermott, J.: 1982, R1: A rule-based configurer of computer systems, Artificial Intelligence 19, 39–88.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, T. M., Steinberg, L. I. and Shulman, J. S.: 1985, A knowledge-based approach to design, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence PAMI-7, 5, 502–510.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, T. M., Mahadevan, S., and Steinberg, L. L.: 1985, LEAP: A learning apprentice for VLSI design, Proceedings of IJCAI, IJCAI, pp. 573–580.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mittal, S. and Araya, A.: 1986, A knowledge-based framework for design, American Assocation of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 856–865.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mostow, J. and Barley, M.: 1987, Automated reuse of design plans, Proceedings ICED, IEEE, August, pp. 632–647.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newman, S. and Marshall, C.: 1990, Pushing Toulim Too Far: Learning from an argument representation scheme, Technical Report, Xeroc PARC.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pearl, J.: 1982, Reverend Bayes On Inference Engines: A distributed hierarchical approach, AAAI-82, pp. 133–136.

    Google Scholar 

  • Potts, C. and Bruns, G.: 1988, Recording the reasons for design decisions, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 418–427.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stefik, M. J.: 1981, Planning with constraints (Molgen: Part 1 & 2), Artificial Intelligence 16 (2), 111–170.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Steinberg, L. and Mitchell, T.: 1984, A knowledge-based approach to VLSI CAD: The redesign system, 21st Design Automation Conference, IEEE.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sussman, G. J. and Steele, G. L.: 1980, Constraints—A language for expressing almost-hierachical descriptions, Artificial Intelligence 14, 1–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thompson, J. B. and Lu, S. C. Y.: 1989, Representing and using design rationale in concurrent product and process design, Proceedings of the Symposium on Concurrent Product and Process Design, ASME Winter Annual Meeting, pp. 109–115.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tong, C.: 1987, AI in engineering design, Artificial Intelligence in Engineering 2 (3), 130–166.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilensky, R.: 1983, Planning And Understanding, Addison-Wesley, Reading.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yakemovic, K. C. B. and Conklin, E. J.: 1990, Report on a development project use of an issue-based information system, CSCW 90 Proceedings, pp. 105–118.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Klein, M. (1992). DRCS: An Integrated System for Capture of Designs and Their Rationale. In: Gero, J.S., Sudweeks, F. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Design ’92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2787-5_20

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2787-5_20

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5238-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-2787-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics