Early design interference detection based on qualitative physics

Developing multi-disciplinary products presents cross-disciplinary problems that are difficult to predict and to solve. Unfortunately, those cross-disciplinary problems are often discovered only at a later stage of the design through physical prototypes and can lead to modification of the conceptual design of a product. This is extremely costly and time consuming. This paper describes a new software tool, a Design Interference Detector (DID), which based on qualitative reasoning infers possible problematic physical phenomena that may appear in a design. However, qualitative reasoning techniques often reveal a shortcoming of generating too many negligible solutions. This is a burden to the designer and makes qualitative reasoning practically unusable. Therefore, we developed two filtering methods that filter out such negligible solutions and highlight only potential cross-disciplinary problems. DID with these filtering methods aims particularly at supporting redesign of complex multi-disciplinary products. The paper analyzes advantages and limitations of the filtering methods through a case study.