Evolutionary Design in Engineering

Abstract

Engineering design is an age-old yet important topic, taught in most engineering schools around the world and practiced in all engineering disciplines. In most scenarios of engineering design, depending on whether there is a need for performing the particular design task, a number of well laid-out steps are followed: (i) conceptual design in which one or more concepts are formulated and evaluated, (ii) embodiment design in which more concrete shapes and material of components are decided, and (iii) detail design in which all dimensions, par ameters, tolerancing, etc. of the components are made usually with an optimization framework and with a view to manufacturing aspects of the design. These steps are usually repeated a few times before finalizing the design and making a blueprint for manufacturing the product. Although optimization is an integral part of the engineering design process at every step mentioned above, often such a task is overshadowed by the experience of designers and the race for achieving a record turn-over design time.