The research objective of this award is to assess how creative a particular design concept is, and, more specifically, to determine what attributes lead to a more (or less) creative design concept. To achieve this objective, the research uses credit assignment approaches derived for multiagent coordination to evaluate the impact of various attributes on the creativity of the full design concept. In particular, the research will provide clear guidance on what the criteria should be to evaluate the creativity of design concept variants generated in an automated design environment.
If successful, the results of this research will help identify the most creative design concepts early in the design process. The intellectual merit of this award is in its blending state of the art automated concept generation techniques with new agent coordination strategies to allow the emergence of creativity as a combination of attributes (e.g., agents). Quantifying the impact of specific attributes (local impact) on the creativity of a concept (global impact) is a key contribution. The broader impact includes far-reaching effects on engineering product design. A method that generally captures the creative potential of a design, a-priori to market introduction, could revolutionize how industry designs and develops new products, and provide an advantage to United States industry. This research will engage both the multiagent and engineering design communities. Workshops will be held at the flagship conferences in each field. In addition, the PIs will leverage an NSF funded effort that created an Engineering Virtual Organization to both enter and receive data to assess concepts. Furthermore, the impact of methods that enhance and bring forward the creativity of students will be tested through an automated design competition at the end of the project to engage the students. Finally, students in the introductory and senior design courses will be engaged to experiment with the new method.
