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Design documentation is presumed to contain massive amounts of valuable information and expert knowledge that is useful for learning from the past successes and failures. However, the current practice of documenting design in most industries does not result in big data that can support a true digital transformation of enterprise. Very little information on concepts and decisions in early product design has been digitally captured, and the access and retrieval of them via taxonomy-based knowledge management systems are very challenging because most rule-based classification and search systems cannot concurrently process heterogeneous data (text, figures, tables, references). When experts retire or leave a design unit, industry often cannot benefit from past knowledge for future product design, and is left to reinvent the wheel repeatedly. In this work, we present AI-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) models which are trained for contextually representing technical documents containing texts, figures and tables, to do a semantic search for the retrieval of relevant data across large corpora of documents. By connecting textual and non-textual data through the use of an associative database, the semantic search question-answering system we developed can provide more comprehensive answers in the context of users’ questions. For the demonstration and assessment of this model, the semantic search question-answering system is applied to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report 2019, which is more than 600 pages long and difficult to read and understand, even by most experts. Users can input custom queries relating to climate change concerns and receive evidence from the report that is contextually meaningful. We expect this method can transform current repositories of design documentation of heterogeneous data forms into structured knowledge-bases which can return relevant information efficiently as well as can evolve to embody manageable big data for the true digital transformation of design. 

Abstract Nearly every artifact of the modern engineering design process is digitally recorded and stored, resulting in an overwhelming amount of raw data detailing past designs. Analyzing this design knowledge and extracting functional information from sets of digital documents is a difficult and time-consuming task for human designers. For the case of textual documentation, poorly written superfluous descriptions filled with jargon are especially challenging for junior designers with less domain expertise to read. If the task of reading documents to extract functional requirements could be automated, designers could actually benefit from the distillation of massive digital repositories of design documentation into valuable information that can inform engineering design. This paper presents a system for automating the extraction of structured functional requirements from textual design documents by applying state of the art Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. A recursive method utilizing Machine Learning-based question-answering is developed to process design texts by initially identifying the highest-level functional requirement, and subsequently extracting additional requirements contained in the text passage. The efficacy of this system is evaluated by comparing the Machine Learning-based results with a study of 75 human designers performing the same design document analysis task on technical texts from the field of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS). The prospect of deploying such a system on the sum of all digital engineering documents suggests a future where design failures are less likely to be repeated and past successes may be consistently used to forward innovation. 

Abstract Axiomatic Design (AD) provides a powerful thinking framework for solving complex engineering problems through the concept of design domains and diligent mapping and decomposition between functional and physical domains. Despite this utility, AD is yet to be implemented for widespread use by design practitioners solving real world problems in industry and exists primarily in the realm of academia. This is due, in part, to a high level of design expertise and familiarity with its methodology required to apply the AD approach effectively. It is difficult to correctly identify, extract, and abstract top-level functional requirements (FRs) based on early-stage design research. Furthermore, guiding early-stage design by striving to maintain functional independence, the first Axiom, is difficult at a systems level without explicit methods of quantifying the relationship between high-level FRs and design parameters (DPs). To address these challenges, Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, specifically in deep learning (DL) assisted Natural Language Processing (NLP), have been applied to represent design knowledge for machines to understand, and, following AD principles, support the practice of human designers. NLP-based question-answering is demonstrated to automate early-stage identification of FRs and to assist design decomposition by recursively mapping and traversing down along the FR-DP hierarchical structure. Functional coupling analysis could then be conducted with vectorized FRs and DPs from NLP-based language embeddings. This paper presents a framework for how AI can be applied to design based on the principles of AD, which will enable a virtual design assistant system based on both human and machine intelligence.