Nature is often used to inspire solutions for complex engineering problems, but achieving its full potential is challenging due to difficulties in discovering relevant analogies and synthesizing from them. Here, we present an end-to-end system, BioSpark, that generates biological-analogical mechanisms and provides an interactive interface to comprehend and synthesize from them. BioSpark pipeline starts with a small seed set of mechanisms and expands it using an iteratively constructed taxonomic hierarchies, overcoming data sparsity in manual expert curation and limited conceptual diversity in automated analogy generation via LLMs. The interface helps designers with recognizing and understanding relevant analogs to design problems using four main interaction features. We evaluate the biological-analogical mechanism generation pipeline and showcase the value of BioSpark through case studies. We end with discussion and implications for future work in this area.

翻译：自然界常被用于激发复杂工程问题的解决方案，但由于难以发现相关类比并从中进行综合，其全部潜力难以充分发挥。本文提出端到端系统BioSpark，该平台可生成生物类比机制，并提供交互式界面以辅助理解与综合应用。BioSpark流水线从少量机制种子集出发，利用迭代构建的分类层级结构进行扩展，从而克服了人工专家策展中的数据稀疏性，以及通过大语言模型自动生成类比时存在的概念多样性不足问题。该界面通过四种主要交互功能，帮助设计者识别并理解与设计问题相关的类比案例。我们评估了生物类比机制生成流水线的性能，并通过案例研究展示了BioSpark的应用价值。最后，我们讨论了该领域的未来研究方向及其启示。