Finding meaningful concepts in engineering application datasets which allow for a sensible grouping of designs is very helpful in many contexts. It allows for determining different groups of designs with similar properties and provides useful knowledge in the engineering decision making process. Also, it opens the route for further refinements of specific design candidates which exhibit certain characteristic features. In this work, an approach to define meaningful and consistent concepts in an existing engineering dataset is presented. The designs in the dataset are characterized by a multitude of features such as design parameters, geometrical properties or performance values of the design for various boundary conditions. In the proposed approach the complete feature set is partitioned into several subsets called description spaces. The definition of the concepts respects this partitioning which leads to several desired properties of the identified concepts. This cannot be achieved with state-of-the-art clustering or concept identification approaches. A novel concept quality measure is proposed, which provides an objective value for a given definition of concepts in a dataset. The usefulness of the measure is demonstrated by considering a realistic engineering dataset consisting of about 2500 airfoil profiles, for which the performance values (lift and drag) for three different operating conditions were obtained by a computational fluid dynamics simulation. A numerical optimization procedure is employed, which maximizes the concept quality measure and finds meaningful concepts for different setups of the description spaces, while also incorporating user preference. It is demonstrated how these concepts can be used to select archetypal representatives of the dataset which exhibit characteristic features of each concept.
翻译:在工程应用数据集中寻找能够合理组合设计设计的有意义的概念,在许多情况下非常有用。它有助于确定具有类似特性的不同设计组群,在工程决策过程中提供有用的知识。此外,它还开辟了对具有某些特点的具体设计候选人进行进一步改进的途径,这些候选人具备某些特点;在这项工作中,提出了在现有工程数据集中界定有意义和一致概念的方法;数据集的设计具有设计参数、几何属性或各种边界条件设计性能值等多种特征的特征。在拟议方法中,完整功能组被分成几个称为描述空间的子集。概念的定义尊重了这种分割,从而导致对所确定概念的几种预期属性。这无法通过最先进的组合或概念识别方法实现。提出了一个新的概念质量计量,为数据集中给给特定概念下定义提供了客观价值。该计量的有用性体现在考虑一个现实工程数据集,由大约2 500个空底油配置组成,为此将三个称为描述空间的子集,其性能值(提升和拖动)分成几个子组。三个不同操作特性的划分,这些概念的划分使所确定的概念具有若干期望的特性。这无法实现。采用最先进的组合组合或概念,而采用不同的计算模型的精确的模型则采用不同的计算模型,采用不同的计算模型的精度的精度的精度的精度的精度的精度模拟。