Innovative Computing Methods and Their Applications to Engineering Problems

Contrary to popular mythology, the designs of favorable products and successful systems do not appear suddenly, or magically. This second edition of Engineering Design demonstrates that symbolic representation and related problem-solving methods, offer significant opportunities to clarify and articulate concepts of design to lay a better framework for design research and design education. Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides a substantial body of material concerned with understanding and modeling cognitive processes. This book adopts the vocabulary and a paradigm of AI to enhance the presentation and explanation of design. It includes concepts from AI because of their explanatory power and their utility as possible ingredients of practical design activity. This second edition has been enriched by the inclusion of recent work on design reasoning, computational design, AI in design, and design cognition, with pointers to a wide cross section of the current literature.

Contrary to popular mythology, the designs of favorable products and successful systems do not appear suddenly, or magically. This second edition of Engineering Design demonstrates that symbolic representation and related problem-solving methods, offer significant opportunities to clarify and articulate concepts of design to lay a better framework for design research and design education. Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides a substantial body of material concerned with understanding and modeling cognitive processes. This book adopts the vocabulary and a paradigm of AI to enhance the presentation and explanation of design. It includes concepts from AI because of their explanatory power and their utility as possible ingredients of practical design activity. This second edition has been enriched by the inclusion of recent work on design reasoning, computational design, AI in design, and design cognition, with pointers to a wide cross section of the current literature.

The study of structural analysis and design is a central subject in civil, aeronautical and mechanical engineering. This book presents a modern and unified introduction to structural analysis, with a strong emphasis on how structures actually behave. The unifying theme is the application of energy methods, developed without the formal mathematics of the calculus of variations. The energy approach makes it possible to articulate the logical relationship between equilibrium and compatibility; emphasise the unity of structural analysis, particularly for indeterminate structures; and identify the roles of idealization and discretization in structural modelling. Thus, energy methods also serve as a prelude to the main ideas behind modern computational approaches to structural analysis and design. As an aid to upper-level undergraduate students in mastering this material, the text includes numerous worked examples, as well as homework problems.