Dr Peter Kilpatrick

Published in the Journal of Computational Design and Engineering

This work presents a novel bottom-up methodology to generate designs that can be tightly integrated with the additive manufacturing environment and that can respond flexibly to changes in that environment….The method is bio-inspired, based on strategies observed in natural systems, particularly in biological growth and development. The design geometry is grown in a computer-aided design-based, bio-inspired generative design system called ‘Biohaviour’.

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 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)

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

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.”