Elsevier

Computer-Aided Design

Volume 44, Issue 10, October 2012, Pages 916-930
Computer-Aided Design

Learning the “Whys”: Discovering design rationale using text mining — An algorithm perspective

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cad.2011.08.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Collecting design rationale (DR) and making it available in a well-organized manner will better support product design, innovation and decision-making. Many DR systems have been developed to capture DR since the 1970s. However, the DR capture process is heavily human involved. In addition, with the increasing amount of DR available in archived design documents, it has become an acute problem to research a new computational approach that is able to capture DR from free textual contents effectively. In our previous study, we have proposed an ISAL (issue, solution and artifact layer) model for DR representation. In this paper, we focus on algorithm design to discover DR from design documents according to the ISAL modeling. For the issue layer of the ISAL model, we define a semantic sentence graph to model sentence relationships through language patterns. Based on this graph, we improve the manifold-ranking algorithm to extract issue-bearing sentences. To discover solution–reason bearing sentences for the solution layer, we propose building up two sentence graphs based on candidate solution-bearing sentences and reason-bearing sentences respectively, and propagating information between them. For artifact information extraction, we propose two term relations, i.e. positional term relation and mutual term relation. Using these relations, we extend our document profile model to score the candidate terms. The performance and scalability of the algorithms proposed are tested using patents as research data joined with an example of prior art search to illustrate its application prospects.

Highlights

► An exploration of using text mining to discover design rationale in text is reported. ► Algorithms are designed for artifact extraction, issue summary and cause–solution. ► The proposal is based on an issue, solution and artifact layer based DR modeling.

Introduction

To assist engineering design, many computer-aided design and engineering (CAD/E) systems have been developed since the 1960s. Based on the techniques of computer graphics, traditional CAD systems have been helpful in modeling and simulating design objects in 2D or 3D contexts [1]. While these CAD systems can help designers to represent their ideas by means of formal geometrical models, they are expected to provide means of designing new products. Since the 1980s, artificial intelligence techniques have been applied into CAD systems to suggest possible solutions from design knowledge bases. As increasing design information is available in digital form, there is a need to integrate such helpful information into the design knowledge bases to better assist design analysis, innovation and decision-making. It is therefore considered that one of the major concepts for future CAD systems is to build design knowledge bases with a variety of useful engineering design knowledge [2].

Among such design information and knowledge, design rationale (DR) is regarded as one kind of important knowledge for the next-generation product development system [1]. DR generally refers to the explanation of why an artifact is designed the way it is [3]. It is able to help designers to understand design know-how and the technology of an artifact, and also it facilitates the reuse of design knowledge in decision-making and product innovation. Without a careful record of useful design information, significant time and effort are cost to search for relevant answers [4].

Since the 1970s, many DR approaches have been developed with this goal in mind, such as SEURAT for software development [5] and DRed for industrial engineering [4]. However, such DR systems have not been widely spread in industry [6]. One of the most critical reasons is that, they require heavy human involvement to interpret and load DR information into the systems. In addition, they mainly attempt to record DR along design processes, while DRs stored in other archival design documents, such as design reports and patents, are often neglected. Although DR in documents can be interpreted into a predefined DR structure by designers, inconsistency will occur and consequently affect the storage and retrieval of rationales. In order to make the DR process more effective and tractable, one of the promising approaches relies on computational algorithms to discover DR from a large number of archival design documents using text mining techniques. We have also observed that although text mining and machine learning techniques have been applied in design document processing, a limited number of tasks focus on mining deep information from design documents, and none of them is on DR.

In our previous study, we have proposed a layered rationale representation model, Issue, Solution and Artifact Layer (ISAL) [7] and included a conceptual comparison framework between our ISAL model and the classical DR model, i.e. IBIS (Issue based Information System) model. In this paper, we focus on algorithm design to automatically extract DR information from a large amount of archival design documents according to our ISAL model. For each single document, we will extract a single set of issue, solution and artifact. The performance evaluation and scalability test of the algorithms are also detailed. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the state of the art on several relevant topics, i.e. DR models and systems, design document processing and patent processing for design, and highlights the challenges and opportunities. In Section 3, we detail our algorithm design for the ISAL model. Next, an ISAL-based DR retrieval framework is described in Section 4. Using patent documents as our research data, Section 5 then reveals the performance of our DR discovery approach and Section 6 reports an example of DR extracted and a case study on DR retrieval based on the ISAL model. Section 7 discusses some issues in our current DR strategy, including using patents as research data, structure issue in patent texts, DR and process in presenting a holistic view of DR development, etc. Section 8 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

DR representation models and systems

How to represent DR effectively is the most important issue in DR management. It affects the reuse of DR information and knowledge [3]. DR representation models vary greatly as they support different design activities. The first approach is argumentation-based representation. Issue based Information System (IBIS) [8] is the earliest argumentation-based method to represent DR and it is the original model for most DR approaches [9]. In IBIS, issues, positions, arguments and their relationships

ISAL model

In our previous study, we have proposed a computational model, i.e. ISAL [7], which provides the foundation for our further research, such as DR discovery, retrieval and analysis. The ISAL model consists of three layers to represent DR, i.e. issue layer, solution layer and artifact layer, as shown in Fig. 1.

The issue layer describes the design motivational reasons and objectives of designing an artifact. It can be needs of the artifact, limitations of prior relevant artifacts, problems and

An ISAL-based DR discovery, retrieval and management framework

Based on our ISAL representation model and the aforementioned algorithm design, we propose a framework for DR discovery, retrieval and management as shown in Fig. 6. This framework consists of two modules, i.e. DR information organization module and DR search and retrieval module.

The DR information organization module aims to capture and secure DR information from e-design documents by two basic processes. They are DR discovery process and manual DR annotation process. The DR discovery process

Experimental setup

In our study, we use patent documents as our research data. Unlike internal design documents, e.g. design reports, which are confidential, patent documents are quality data source and open accessible with critical rationale information. We randomly collected 18 290 patent documents that were patented by Hewlett-Packard Company or Epson on the topic of inkjet printer design from United States patent database as our research data. Among these 18 290 patents, we randomly selected 300 patents that

An example using inkjet printhead

In order to illustrate our approach for DR discovery and ISAL-based retrieval framework, we demonstrate example DRs extracted by our algorithm and a DR retrieval case study.

Fig. 10 shows the DR extracted from a patent that focuses on high print quality printhead. From the issue layer, it indicates the motivations of a new design. For example, it includes the general requirement of higher quality printing from the market. Also it indicates some detailed design considerations. An example is that

Discussions

Our DR approach has taken advantage of several timely research efforts in text mining, machine learning, information retrieval and text processing at large, and it is technically quite different from the traditional systems that rely on manual efforts in DR capture while design archives are often left intact. A few issues deserve our immediate attention particularly related to the technical strength, merits as well as limitation of the current approach, and hopefully, it sheds light on some

Conclusions

In this paper, we have given our focus to algorithm design for DR discovery and management from a large amount of digitized design documents with rich textual content. Our research efforts in algorithm design, i.e. artifact information extraction, issue summarization and solution–reason pair identification, are structured based on a computational DR model ISAL which was introduced in our previous study. Further experimental studies have been conducted to assess the performance of our proposed

Acknowledgment

The work described in this paper was supported by a research grant from the National University of Singapore (R-265-000-362-133) and was partially supported by an open project of the State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, China (Grant No: A1013).

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