Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human designers use previous designs extensively in the process of producing a new design. When they come up with a partial or complete design, designers perform a mental simulation to verify the design.W e present a model for engineering design that integrates case-based reasoning and qualitative simulation. The model involves: (1) setting up the functional requirements, (2) accessing memory to retrieve cases relevant to the requirements, (3) synthesizing pieces of cases into designs, (4) verifying and testing the design, and finally, (5) debugging. This process is apphed recursively till the design is complete and bug free. The model integrates different levels of representation and reasoning mechanisms in order to effectively support the design tasks.