Creating a design from modular components necessitates three steps: Acquiring knowledge about available components, conceiving an abstract design concept, and implementing that concept in a concrete design. The third step entails many repetitive and menial tasks, such as inserting parts and creating joints between them. Especially when comparing and implementing design alternatives, this issue is compounded. We propose a use-case agnostic knowledge-driven framework to automate the implementation step. In particular, the framework catalogues the acquired knowledge and the design concept, as well as utilizes Combinatory Logic Synthesis to synthesize concrete design alternatives. This minimizes the effort required to create designs, allowing the design space to be thoroughly explored. We implemented the framework as a plugin for the CAD software Autodesk Fusion 360. We conducted a case study in which robotic arms were synthesized from a set of 28 modular components. Based on the case study, the applicability of the framework is analyzed and discussed.

翻译：从模块化组件创建设计需要三个步骤：获取关于可用组件的知识、构思抽象设计概念、以及将该概念实现为具体设计。第三步涉及许多重复且琐碎的任务，例如插入零件并创建它们之间的连接。尤其在比较和实现设计替代方案时，这一问题更加突出。我们提出了一种与用例无关的知识驱动框架，用于自动化实现步骤。具体而言，该框架对获取的知识和设计概念进行编目，并利用组合逻辑合成（Combinatory Logic Synthesis）来生成具体的设计替代方案。这最大限度地减少了创建设计所需的工作量，使得设计空间能够被充分探索。我们将该框架作为插件实现于CAD软件Autodesk Fusion 360中。我们进行了一项案例研究，其中从28个模块化组件集合合成了机械臂。基于该案例研究，我们对框架的适用性进行了分析和讨论。