Towards producing innovative engineering design concepts using AI – paper (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