IMPLEMENTATION OF IDEA ALGEBRA FOR AUTOMATION OF ENGINEERING DESIGN PROCESSES

Abstract

Engineering design is a field of research that is used to identify and solve problems in the engineering area and to provide solutions for the development and further improvement of the products, processes and systems that satisfies all demands and requirements of a client. The conceptual design methods are highly important methods that are used to guide other design methods and the process starting with the identification of the parameters of the system and ending with the final design. There are many well-established and widely applied methods in this field that helps engineers to improve the design process. But there is a lack of methods that are able to automate some processes of the design and decrease the routine design processes. The main purpose of the thesis is to introduce a novel engineering design methodology, apply it in different fields of engineering and compare it with other conventional methods and tools. In this work, firstly Idea Algebra was applied for the generation of the system’s network for reliability analysis of an automobile system, followed by automatic creation of the Bayesian networks that use the rules of the fault tree analysis. Then, the methodology was applied for dynamic reliability analysis of an automobile system, where Idea Algebra was also used as a conceptual method for the creation of the system’s network that was used for the generation of the Dynamic Bayesian Networks using the fault tree rules. As the reliability data used for the analysis was static, the Weibull distribution was used for generating a set of dynamical values for different components of the system. The data then was automatically entered into the program and evaluated. Finally, Idea Algebra was applied for automatic analysis of the planetary gear drives. The proposed methodology was used for generating a set of kinematic, efficiency equations for the analysis of planetary gear drives. The case studies were conducted with comparison to other conventional methods, where our methodology has more advantages and efficiency compared to them.