Our Research

Dr Simon Hickinbotham from the RIED team, supported by Prof Andy Tyrrell, presented this paper at the 2025 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence in Trondheim, Norway 17^th-20^th March 2025 on the subject of Morphogenic Shape Grammars for the Design of Engineering Structures. The associated PowerPoint presentation and poster are available in the Library too.

The abstract is as follows

“Bodies of multicellular organisms are laid out according to morphogens: chemical agents which establish a coordinate system in the early embryo and use this to decide where body parts should grow. This process offers a mechanism for the automation of the design of engineering constructs via evolutionary search in a similar manner to the way biological evolution has driven the diversity of body forms of life on Earth. There are many ways of encoding such body plans, but the main existing approaches have problems around managing the complexity and stability of the evolutionary search process, particularly when applied to practical engineering design problems. This contribution takes the notion of morphogen chemical gradients and uses it to develop a novel grammar for shape formation. The central idea is to organise and label the spatial sub-regions of a design before making decisions regarding the finished arrangement of structure. This makes it much simpler to explore compositions of the hierarchy of sub-assemblies in a design, and to represent design of shape in an evolvable manner. A worked example of such a morphogenic shape grammar is described, and used in a multi-objective evolutionary search for optimal bridge truss structures over four fitness objectives with two design constraints. The resulting Pareto front shows a wide variety of bridge designs, demonstrating the power of this approach to generate a diverse set of viable options to meet engineering design challenges.”

Dr Simon Hickinbotham from the RIED team, supported by Prof Andy Tyrrell, gave a presentation and took part in a poster session at the 2025 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence in Trondheim, Norway 17^th-20^th March 2025 on the subject of Morphogenic Shape Grammars for the Design of Engineering Structures.

The associated poster can be found via the following link

https://riedesign.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hickinbotham_Poster_Morph_Grammars.pdf

Simon Hickinbotham, a Research Fellow from the RIED team at the University of York, presented this Late Breaking Abstract and Poster at the International Society for Artificial Life 22-26 July 2024 Conference in Copenhagen.

This presentation was given by Imelda Friel at the MadeAI Conference in Porto, Portugal in July 2024

This paper was presented by Imelda Friel at the MadeAI Conference in Porto, Portugal in July 2024.

This paper examines the application of a novel Evolutionary-Development (Evo-Devo)
system that integrates AI tools within the conceptual design process to produce populations of
innovative design options. The aim is to allow the behaviours of designs to be learned and then
exploited later in the design process. Here a design concept (referred to as an organism) is
constructed from cells, which have an evolving NN architecture controlling each
cells’parameterisation. The following work demonstrates the application of the Evo-Devo
process on a volume-to-point heat transfer problem, returning design concepts with a network
of heat channels that direct heat built up in the plate to a point at ambient temperature

This presentation was given by Professor Andy Tyrrell on behalf of our Alumni, Rahul Dubey at the July 2024 IEEE sponsored World Congress on Computational Intelligence from June 30 – July 5, in Yokohama, Japan Conference

This paper was presented by Professor Andy Tyrrell on behalf of our Alumni, Rahul Dubey at the July 2024 IEEE sponsored World Congress on Computational Intelligence from June 30 – July 5, in Yokohama, Japan Conference

In recent years, the evolutionary developmental (Evo-Devo) concept has gained traction in the field of engineering design. This paper presents a new biologically inspired approach rooted in Evo-Devo principles to iteratively develop car chassis designs based on a specified design brief. The proposed method draws inspiration from biological cell growth and differentiation behaviours to generate intricate engineering designs. Employing evolutionary algorithms, the paper aims to evolve gene regulatory
networks that govern the growth of a minimal viable design. The primary goal is to achieve an optimal design capable of withstanding sudden crash impacts within safety limits. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach, using genetic algorithms, evolves gene regulatory networks that generate a spectrum of viable designs. Furthermore, the best evolved solution exhibits generalizability and adaptability across different simulation parameters.

This presentation was given by Dr Edgar Buchanan Berumen, a member of our RIED Team from the University of York, to the IEEE sponsored World Congress on Computational Intelligence, from June 30 – July 5, in Yokohama, Japan.

Other RIED team members including Simon Hickinbotham, Rahul Dubey, Imelda Field, Andrew Colligan, Mark Price and Andy Tyrrell contributed to the paper.

This paper was presented at the June 2024 NAFEMs Conference. NAFEMS is the International Association for the Engineering Modelling, Analysis and Simulation Community.

Metallic scaffolds are used as implants to help heal bones. Sheet-based Triply
Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS) are of interest due to their high surface-to-volume ratio (S/V), customisable stiffness, and can be realised using Additive Manufacturing (AM). Other studies investigate porosity and pore size of scaffolds but they frequently overlook S/V, which is critical for cellular response. Additionally, the limitation of AM (esp. Selective Laser Melting (SLM)) causes discrepancies between intended and actual physical and mechanical properties of those structures, and this also needs to be addressed. This work investigates three types of TPMS scaffolds made in pure Titanium, with an emphasis on design vs manufactured differences and the significance of S/V. As-designed scaffolds reported 70-75% porosity and 25-35 cm-1 S/V, and stiffness was measured using finite element analysis (FEA) at 6.7-9.3 GPa. The manufactured scaffolds had 59-70% porosity and 33-42 cm-1 S/V. Laboratory compression testing revealed an effective Young’s modulus of 5-9 GPa, comparable to bone. Image-based simulation method was also employed on the built samples which reported the stiffness range of 8.3-16.6 GPa, overestimating it by 57%. It is hypothesised that these discrepancies stem from the secondary roughness deposited on the scaffold walls during SLM, causing reduction in porosity yet not contributing to structure’s strength. The cyber physical validation methods presented are a good way to quantify these
discrepancies, allowing feedback to the design stages for more predictable as manufactured structures.

https://www.nafems.org/publications/resource_center/uk24_ext_abs_18

We are delighted to share that Colin Roitt, a RIED PhD Student at the University of York, recently presented a paper and poster at the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART). This was part of “evostar”, the leading European event on Bio-Inspired Computation that took part in Aberystwyth, Wales, UK 3-5 April

Colin’s paper entitled “Enough is Enough: Learning to Stop in Generative Systems” proposed that while Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) have been used to drive artificial generative systems these systems must begin and then stop generation, or growth, akin to their biological counterpart. A Long Short-Term Memory style network was implemented as a GRN for an Evo-Devo generative system and was tested on one simple (single point target) and two more complex problems (structured and unstructured point clouds). The novel LSTMGRN performed well in simple tasks to optimise stopping conditions, but struggled to manage more complex environments. This early work in self-regulating growth will allow for further research in more complex systems to allow the removal of hyperparameters and allowing the evolutionary system to stop dynamically and prevent organisms overshooting the optimal.

Here are links to the paper

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-56992-0_22

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56992-0_22

Well done Colin !

This paper was presented by Orlagh Casey at the IAAC’s Responsive Cities Collective Intelligence Design symposium in Barcelona on 27-28 November 2023.

Abstract : The field of architectural design is undergoing a profound transformation catalysed by the rapid advancements in smart material systems. This paradigm- shifting journey is marked by the integration of innovative materials, capable of responding to environmental stimuli and adapting their properties, thereby challenging traditional architectural framework. Within this innovative landscape, mycelium-based materials have emerged as sustainable construction materials. This research introduces a novel
Bio-Integrative Design Framework (BIDF) to guide the incorporation and understanding of living matter in architectural design.
The integration of generative design software, inspired by evolutionary developmental principles, further enhances the potential of mycelium-based materials in architectural design. The RIED (Re-Imagining Engineering Design) engine embraces nature’s principles, enabling designers and engineers to explore an extensive design space, resulting in a vast array of optimised solutions. The integration of the BIDF-RIED engine can introduce a new level of adaptability and sustainability to architectural projects. The RIED engine transcends conventional design methodologies, emphasising adaptability, design growth, and intelligent learning systems. Fostering a novel design engine with emerging living materials offers a vast design space, considering functionality, material behaviour, structural ability, and environmental constraints.

This paper was presented at the 2023 3rd International Conference on Mechanical, Aerospace and Automotive Engineering (CMAAE 2023) held in Nanjing, China.

A buffer is an important element in a production line and its allocation influences the throughput and inventory of the line. The buffer allocation problem can be framed as a multi-objective optimisation problem and is often addressed by using meta-heuristic algorithms, such as evolutionary algorithms. However, these algorithms primarily focus on the “genetic evolution” aspect and do not take in to account the impact of the biological “organism development” process, potentially constraining the exploration of the solution space. In this paper, a bio-inspired evolution-development (evo-devo) approach for modelling and optimising buffer allocations is proposed. The organism representing a production line is defined and modelled, and the evolution and development processes of organisms are developed for researching optimised solutions. The method has been validated by a simulation of a buffer allocation optimisation in an unreliable serial production line with multi-objectives, aiming to maximize production throughput and minimize the total buffer size. Results show that the
proposed method can efficiently obtain solutions, while also achieving greater exploration of the solution space than competing evolutionary algorithms such as the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II. The proposed approach’s functionality means that it could be applied to other areas of generative design of future factories.

This paper was presented at the 2023 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI), Mexico City, Mexico in December 2023.

Engineering design has traditionally involved human engineers manually creating and iterating on designs based on their expertise and knowledge. In Bio-inspired Evolutionary Development (EvoDevo), generative algorithms are used to explore a much larger design space that may not have ever been considered by human engineers. However, for complex systems, the designer is often required to start the EvoDevo process with an initial design (seed) which the development process will optimise. The question is: will a good starting seed yield a good set of design solutions for the given problem? This paper considers this question and suggests that sub-optimal seeds can provide, up to certain limits, better design solutions than relatively more optimal seeds. In addition, this paper highlights the importance of designing the appropriate seed for the appropriate problem. In this paper, the problem analysed is the structural performance of a Warren Truss (bridge-like structure) under a single load. The main conclusion of this paper is that up to a limit sub optimal seeds provide in general better sets of solutions than more optimal seeds. After this limit, the performance of sub-optimal seed starts to degrade as parts of the phenotype landscape become inaccessible.

This paper was presented at the 2023 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI in Mexico City, Mexico from 5-8 December 2023.

Evolutionary approaches to engineering design involve generating populations of candidate solutions that compete via a selection process iteratively, to improve measures of performance over many generations. Although the attractive properties of biological evolutionary systems have motivated researchers to investigate emulating them for engineering design, there has been an emphasis on using encodings of the technical artefacts themselves, rather than encoding a complete bio-inspired system which is capable of producing such artefacts. It is the latter approach which is the subject of this contribution: how might a bio-inspired system be designed that self-organises the process of engineering design and manufacture?

Professor Mark Price’s presentation from the IMechE Simulation Conference 2023.

The ASSESS Initiative is a broad reaching multi-industry initiative with a primary goal to facilitate a revolution of enablement that will vastly increase the availability and utility of Engineering Simulation, leading to significantly increased business benefits across the full spectrum of industries, applications and users. Since June 2022, ASSESS as been part of NAFEMS.

Members of the RIED Loughborough attended the THERMEC 2023 Conference in Vienna, Austria, a very prestigious bi-annual International Conference on “PROCESSING & MANUFACTURING OF ADVANCED MATERIALS: Processing, Fabrication, Properties, Applications”

The work presented was on the biodegradable and bioresorbable materials for medical devices and scaffolds based on Ca-Mg-Zn chemistry for bulk metallic glasses. PhD researcher Shangmou Yang and supervisors Profs Paul Conway and Carmen Torres presented and defended the paper entitled “Can multifunctionality of bioresorbable BMGs be tuned by controlling crystallinity?” during the session ‘Metallic Glasses 3’ chaired by one of them most eminent and internationally respected experts in bulk metallic glasses, Prof Jürgen Eckert, from Montanuniversität Leoben & Erich Schmid Institute of Materials Science, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Leoben (Austria).

^{Shangmou presenting at THERMEC 2023}

It was Shangmou’s first international experience presenting his work; he was well prepared and did a very good job in front of scientists from all over the world who are also working on that alloy system. This work is co-sponsored by Alloyed Ltd, the Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering and EPSRC Programme Grant ‘RIED’.

^{Shangmou happy (and relieved!) after his presentation}

And to make it even more special…

The RIED-Wien local team came to support us and boost our mood!

We met with Dr Vincent McKenna, RIED alumnus, who now resides in Vienna. It was a fabulous occasion, and we spent a lovely time with him there, celebrating how well he is doing in the city he now calls home. We are already looking forward to meeting him again (here in the UK or in Wien!)

^{Shangmou, Vincent, Carmen and Paul at the Belvedere Palace gardens, in Vienna}

Supporting presentation to the Evolving Design Modifiers paper

Evolutionary Developmental biology (EvoDevo) is a process of directed growth whose mechanisms could be used in an evolutionary algorithm for engineering applications. Engineering design can be thought of as a search through a high-dimensional design space for a small number of solutions that are optimal by various metrics. Configuring this search within an EvoDevo algorithm may allow developmental processes to provide a facility to give more immediate, localised feedback to the system as it grows into its final optimal configuration (form). This approach would augment current design practices. The main components needed to run EvoDevo for engineering design are set out in this paper, and these are developed into an algorithm for initial investigations, resulting in evolved neural network-based structural design modifying operators that optimise the structure of a planar truss in an iterative, decentralized manner against multiple objectives. Preliminary results are presented which show that the two levels feedback at the Evo and Devo stages drive the system to ultimately produce feasible solutions.

Conference Publication by Laura McGirr in June 2022 at the ISR EU2022 Conference in Munich, Germany.

The goal of the research outlined in this paper is to facilitate improved communication and
enable co-ordinated research collaboration across academic researchers and industry in the implementation of HRC installations.

This paper describes the aspects of the system analogous to nature alongside the data structures used to represent the developing organism and its ability to interact and respond to the environment. It demonstrates how manufacturing specific information can be coded in the system and in the genome of the cells and expressed in the organism through the development process in this new design system.

This paper was included in the proceedings from the on-line 37^th International Manufacturing Conference, co-hosted by the Athlone Institute of Technology and CONFIRM, held in September 2021

IMC Conference Archive (manufacturingcouncil.ie)

The focus of this paper is on the development of the integrated design and analysis framework with a brief example at the end that showcases how this powerful technique can be used to solve real world problems.

This paper was included in the proceedings from the on-line 37^th International Manufacturing Conference, co-hosted by the Athlone Institute of Technology and CONFIRM, held in September 2021