Utilizing design rationale for layout design support

Discusses the considerations of a designer which influence his decision making. The author proposes a conception of these considerations as a design rationale and proposes to utilize them for layout design support. The difficulty of synthetic problems like design arises from the fact that there is usually more than one candidate for the solution to satisfy the requirements, and the fact that it is not easy to uniquely determine the solution from the specification. Although constraint satisfaction is often utilized, it is hard to specify the necessary and sufficient constraints beforehand, so that the artifact can be uniquely designed. It is believed that designers usually have their own "art of design", a design policy by which they carry out decision-making in design, which is the reason why various artifacts can be designed consistently, even for the same specification, by each designer. In our approach, the designer's rationales for the designed artifact are concretely represented as a tree structure and utilized to support layout design by enabling the designers to refer to the artifacts designed by others in terms of a design rationale. Experiments on the layout design of laboratory equipment were carried out, and the results indicated the effectiveness of our approach to some extent.