Creating structural configurations
Formal engineering design synthesis
Formal engineering design synthesis
A proof of Connelly's conjecture on 3-connected circuits of the rigidity matroid
Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B
Spatial to kinematically determined structural transformations
Advanced Engineering Informatics
Partially autonomous conceptual development of multifunctional structures
International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology
An automated stabilisation method for spatial to structural design transformations
Advanced Engineering Informatics
Automated design studies: Topology versus One-Step Evolutionary Structural Optimisation
Advanced Engineering Informatics
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The paper proposes a methodology to assist the designer at the initial stages of the design synthesis process by enabling him/her to employ knowledge and algorithms existing in graph network theory. The proposed method comprises three main stages: transforming the synthesis problem into a graph theoretic problem; devising the topology possessing special engineering properties corresponding to the system requirements; finding the geometric configuration of that topology that will possess the desired properties. To clarify the idea and to demonstrate its generality, the approach is presented through three synthesis case studies from different engineering domains: electrical networks, statics and kinematics. As is highlighted in the paper, the approach of employing graph theory in the synthesis process offers several unique advantages. Among these advantages are: gaining a general perspective on different synthesis problems from different engineering domains by transforming them into the same graph problem; employing the same graph algorithms for different synthesis problems; establishing the existence of configurations with special properties solely from the topology of the system; transferring knowledge and methods between different engineering disciplines for both the topology and the geometry generation steps.