Intelligent specifications extraction interface for structural design

Many descriptions of the design process do not include the specifications as part of the process, but rather as an input to the design. Once the specifications are considered to be the input, the assumption is made that they are in a form suitable for the design process to proceed. The need for a design always starts with ill-defined objectives. The process by which this information is transformed into well-defined design objectives is called the design specification extraction process. An attempt to expose the underlying structure of the first step in the design process - the design specifications - is presented in this paper. The extraction of specifications is divided into four major tasks of diagnosis or information gathering, interpretation and assessment, classification and decomposition, and information patching. The conceptual framework for the design specification extraction and synthesis is implemented in the expert system program SEISD (Specification Extraction Interface for Structural Design) developed in the LISP programing language. A few examples are presented to demonstrate the implementation strategies. The examples are drawn from the specific problem of beam design.