One of the design methods which emulates the engineering design process, the configuration design methodology, is applied to the design process of paper feeding mechanism within a laser beam printer. Components of a paper feeding mechanism should be designed not to incur vibration to paper and to keep paper flat when transferring. Hybrid knowledge representation is used where the design methods and experience is represented as rules. Design parts are represented as objects according to the functions within the mechanism. Various design rules and constraints are represented by objects and methods.
In the preliminary design stage of a product, the design process is represented hierarchically and the characteristics of each part are determined. Conceptually, the process is analogous to the methodology used in the configuration design. In this research, the design process has been analyzed systematically by the OMT (Object Modeling Technique), which integrates the object, functional, and dynamic models. Various constraint satisfaction methods have been examined, and one of them is adapted to optimize values of the design parameters. A commercial expert system shell, Nexpert Object, is adapted for the implementation. The inferred results are converted to create the BOM (Bill of Materials) data and are saved in a database for the downstream detailed design and production stage.
