The Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 20:3, 271276.

2006, Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S0269888906000609 Printed in the United Kingdom
Design, innovation and case-based reasoning
AS HOK K. GOEL
1
and S US AN CRAW
2
1
College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 801 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280, USA;
e-mail: [email protected]
2
School of Computing, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen AB25 1HG, Scotland, UK;
e-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
The design task is especially appropriate for applying, integrating, exploring and pushing the
boundaries of case-based reasoning. In this paper, we briey review the challenges that design poses
for case-based reasoning and survey research on case-based design ranging from early explorations
to more recent work on innovative design. We also summarize the theoretical contributions this
research has made to case-based reasoning itself.
1 Introduction
All design is redesign has long been a popular cliche in design research. In fact, many design
researchers developed theories of design based on this theme even before the invention of
case-based reasoning (CBR) in articial intelligence. To take just one example, in his seminal book,
Alexander (1964) noted that designs of new villages in rural India are almost always tweaks,
modications or adaptations of existing village designs. He also analyzed the similarities among the
designs in terms of design patterns. Thus, the design task is especially appropriate for applying,
integrating, exploring and pushing the boundaries of CBR.
Eight factors, however, conspire to make the design task very challenging for CBR.
Breadth Design pertains to all kinds of artifacts. The domain of the design task is extremely
wide-ranging. Practical design domains in which CBR has been explored include architecture,
engineering, computer software and humanmachine interfaces. Also, within a domain such as
engineering, design sub-domains range from civil engineering to chemical engineering to aerospace
engineering to industrial engineering. Furthermore, even within a design sub-domain such as
industrial engineering, design outputs range from designs of products and systems, to designs of
processes and services.
Stages Design involves a multitude of stages. The design process starts with some design
requirements, and ends in a realization of a product that satises the requirements. Some of the
common stages of product design are requirements analysis, preliminary design, detailed design,
geometric modeling, simulation, optimization, embodiment, prototype testing, manufacturing and
assembly. CBR so far has been explored largely for preliminary (or conceptual) design.
Specication Design is very open-ended. In general, the specication of the design problem may
evolve during the design process. That is, the problem and the solution specication may co-evolve.
For example, a design problem may be underspecied and its specication may need to be
completed as part of the design process. As another example, a design problem may be
over-constrained and some constraints may need to be relaxed to nd a satisfactory design solution.
Complexity Design is extremely complex. It generally involves a large number of interacting
components. Even in a simple problem in product design there can be dozens or even hundreds of
components. In the design of a complex system there can be thousands, tens of thousands or even
millions of components. CBR so far has been explored for designing products in which the number
of components is in the dozens.
Collaboration In practice, large-scale design typically is performed by teams of designers. Adesign
team may be distributed both spatially and temporally. Thus, not only is the design team situated
in a given social and cultural context, but also each individual designer works in the context of the
team.
Representation Design typically involves consideration of both form and function. External
representations of designs are usually multi-modal. The form of a design typically is represented as
a two-dimensional (2-d) drawing (sketch or diagram) or as a three-dimensional (3-d) solid model.
In contrast, functions and behaviors are typically represented using symbolic structures such as
schemas and graphs, and performance is typically represented using numerical measures.
Integration There already exist a number of computer-aided design (CAD) tools and environ-
ments. Thus, in order to have impact on design practice, CBR tools for supporting interactive
design need to be integrated with the CAD tools and embodied in the CAD environments.
Creativity While most everyday design is routine and mundane, much of interesting design is
innovative and creative. Thus, on one hand, the design task in general poses the challenge of
addressing the issues of innovation and creativity, and, on the other, it oers an opportunity to
explore these issues.
It follows from the above that, at present, there is no real case-based theory of design, let alone
any case-based technology or tool for supporting design in practice. Instead, research on case-based
design so far represents only preliminary explorations into a vast space. In this summary, we briey
review some of the major themes in case-based design research, but note that this review neither is,
nor intended to be, exhaustive. Instead of trying to cover all related work, we focus on long lines
of research that have not only explored CBR in design but also contributed to CBR in return.
Maher & Pu (1997) provide details of some of the ideas and techniques described below.
2 Early explorations
Navinchandras (1991) CYCLOPS was the rst system to explore CBR in interactive design. It
provided landscape architects with access to annotated landscape drawings, where the annotations
on a drawing explained some of the design decisions in the past case. However, CYCLOPS left the
tasks of case adaptation and design evaluation to the architect. It was followed by CADET (Sycara
et al., 1991). Like CYCLOPS, the CADET system was also an interactive system that left the
adaptation and evaluation tasks to the designer. It provided a mechanical engineer with access to
designs of simple mechanical devices, where each design case contained a causal model of the
design. The goal was to enable the designer to do model-based adaptation of the past design.
Goels KRITIK (Goel & Chandrasekaran, 1989; Goel et al., 1997) was the rst autonomous
case-based design system that addressed all the major subtasks of case-based design: retrieval,
adaptation, evaluation and storage. KRITIK addressed the task of conceptual design in the domain
of small, simple engineering devices. Given the specication of the function F, KRITIK generates
a qualitative specication of the structure S. Since it addressed the FS task, it stored an inverse
SBF mapping in the form a structurebehaviorfunction (SBF) model in each past case. The
SBF model provided the vocabulary for indexing the design cases as well as strategies for retrieving,
adapting, verifying and storing design cases. JULIA (Hinrichs, 1992) was another early auton-
omous case-based design system. Although it operated in the informal domain of menu design, it
addressed the important issue of changes in the design requirements during the design process.
3 Interactive design
The early nineties saw an explosion of interest in exploring CBR in interactive design. There were
three major themes in this phase. The rst theme was to annotate drawings of past designs not only
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with explanations of major design decisions but also with the outcomes of the designs (what
worked, what did not and why), and the lessons learned from the outcomes. Kolodner and her
colleagues built the ARCHIE series of interactive design aiding systems to explore this theme in the
domain of building design (Domeshek & Kolodner, 1992; Pearce et al., 1992).
The second theme was to view design adaptation as a constraint satisfaction problem and hence
to integrate CBR and constraint satisfaction. Smith, Faltings and their colleagues built the CADRE
series of interactive design decision support systems that investigated this theme in the domain of
building design (Hua et al., 1994; Dave et al., 1994). Their systems provided access to drawings of
past designs and allowed the designer to make changes to these drawings. The system automatically
propagated the constraints generated by the designers decisions and alerted the designer of any
conicts.
The third theme was integration of case-based design support systems with CAD environments,
which is important for building practical design support systems. Maher and her colleagues
developed a series of interactive CAD systems (e.g. CADsyn, CaseCAD) that explored this theme
in the domain of structural design (Maher & Zhang, 1993; Maher et al., 1995). Another important
element of their work was the development of large repositories of design cases.
Perhaps the most ambitious eort in case-based interactive design was the FABEL system
developed by Vo and her colleagues (Gebhardt et al., 1997). The FABEL system was also an
interactive design decision support system for the domain of building design. It contained large,
complex cases represented as annotated drawings, and used a range of techniques (e.g. rule-based
reasoning, model-based reasoning) to help a designer in design adaptation. An especially
noteworthy aspect of FABEL was its ability to retrieve drawings based on structural similarity with
a query drawing.
4 Innovation in design
By the mid 1990s, research on CBR was beginning to seriously explore innovation and creativity in
design. Faltings & Suns (1996) interactive FAMING system investigated the design of a particular
kind of mechanism embodied in antique wall clocks. An especially noteworthy aspect of FAMING
(which means invention in Chinese) is its integration of functional reasoning with complex structural
reasoning about shapes and spatial relations. FAMING perhaps was the rst case-based system to
strongly couple functional and spatial reasoning.
Bhatta developed the autonomous IDEAL system (Bhatta & Goel, 1997, 1998), which viewed
the ability to transfer knowledge across distant domains as an important element of creativity.
IDEAL abstracted teleological design patterns (e.g. open-loop feedback control) from design cases
in one domain (e.g. operational ampliers) and transferred them to design problems in another
domain (e.g. gyroscopes). Its memory contained past design solutions at multiple abstraction levels
ranging from design cases to design patterns, and it worked on design problems at dierent levels
of abstraction.
Kolodner and her colleagues proposed an account of serendipity in creative design (Wills &
Kolodner, 1994). In their account, a designer working on multiple design problems keeps dierent
design goals in a working memory. As a partial solution to one problem becomes available (by
internal problem solving or external input), the designer may connect the solution to a dierent
design goal, thus addressing a dierent design problem. This account was later used to build a
computational model of a historical case study about Alexander Graham Bells invention of the
telephone (Simina & Koldner, 1997).
Gmez de Silva Garza & Maher (1999) developed an evolutionary approach to design case
adaptation. For design problems in which a function characterizing the tness of the desired design
is known, they represented design cases as genotypes, and used genetic algorithms to adapt past
designs to invent a variety of new designs.
Design, innovation and case-based reasoning 273
5 Other directions
All of the above theories and systems investigated CBR for preliminary phases of design in either
architecture or engineering. However, there also has been some work that explored CBR in other
domains of design and other phases of design. Smyth & Keanes (1996) Dj Vu system was the rst
system to investigate case-based software design. The autonomous Dj Vu system designed
software for plant control. Two interesting aspects of Dj Vu were its use of a hierarchically
organized library of cases to enable CBR at multiple levels of abstraction, and retrieval of cases
based on the needs of the adaptation task. Simpson and his colleagues developed AskJef (Barber
et al., 1992), which was the rst system to investigate case-based reasoning to explore the design of
human-machine interfaces. AskJef, an interactive multimedia system, provided an HCI designer
with libraries of past cases, where each case contained a series of annotated versions in the evolution
of a design.
Chemical formulation is a design task where the nal solution is a recipe consisting of an
approximately constant number of components with relatively limited interactions between them.
Therefore, this task is less open-ended than many design tasks because the components are better
specied. Several case-based design systems have been developed for formulation tasks. The
original example is General Electric Plastics FormTool system, a colour matching system that is in
everyday use (Cheetham & Graf, 1997; Cheetham, 2004). Further examples include pharmaceutical
formulation for the design of tablets to deliver a specic dose of a drug (Craw et al., 1998;
Wiratunga et al., 2002) and the formulation of rubber compounds for tyres (Bandini et al., 2004;
Bandini & Manzoni, 2001), each of which highlights the need for adaptation knowledge to achieve
a stable product that meets requirements.
As mentioned in the introduction, design involves many stages such as requirements analysis,
preliminary design, geometric modeling, etc. Much of the research on case-based design as
described above has focused on preliminary design (i.e. conceptual, qualitative design). However,
some work has also explored later phases of design, and in particular, the phase of assembly and
disassembly of designs. Purvis & Pus (1995) COMPOSER was the rst system to use CBR for
assembly planning in which the task was to develop a sequence of actions for assembling a product
from its components. The autonomous COMPOSER system operated in the domain of simple
mechanical devices, using constraint satisfaction techniques to adapt past cases of assembly
planning. Murdocks REM system (Murdock & Goel, 2001) autonomously adapted the software
architecture of a disassembly planner to generate an assembly planner. REM thus performed
meta-case-based reasoning in which the architecture of an agent that solves some task is adapted
to address a related task.
6 Contributions to CBR
Two characteristics of the above research on CBR in design are especially noteworthy. Firstly,
unlike much work on CBR, research on CBR in design has emphasized the importance of the
adaptation task. This is in part because design cases can be quite complex and thus design
adaptation is especially hard, and partly because of the diculty of populating and organizing large
case memories of complex designs. Secondly, research on CBR in design has not only applied and
integrated CBR to design but also made signicant theoretical contributions to CBR itself. To
summarize, research on CBR in design thus far has made the following main contributions to CBR:
grounded the computational process of CBR in content theories of domain models (e.g. KRITIK
(Goel & Chandrasekaran, 1989; Goel et al., 1997));
integrated CBR with a variety of other computational techniques ranging from model-based
reasoning (e.g. FABEL (Gebhardt et al., 1997)) to constraint satisfaction problems (e.g. CADRE
(Hua et al., 1994; Dave et al., 1994)) to genetic algorithms (e.g. Gmez de Silva Garza & Maher,
1999);
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integrated functional reasoning and spatial reasoning (e.g. FAMING (Faltings & Sun, 1996));
used cases and CBR at multiple levels of abstraction (e.g. Dj Vu (Smyth & Keane, 1996)); and
provided new insights into innovation (e.g. IDEAL (Bhatta & Goel, 1997, 1998)).
These contributions have been driven by the eight challenging factors of design that were
highlighted at the start of this paper. They demonstrate the advanced CBR techniques that have
resulted from the specic challenges of the design task.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Mary Lou Maher for early discussions about the landmark papers
in case-based design that are central to this article.
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