Design Solution Optimization with Ant Colony Optimization

Early in product design, existing automated concept generators use existing knowledge and the desired function to suggest solutions. These methods produce many candidate solutions, but often provide unmanageably large sets of solutions. so techniques are needed to organize the set of solutions into smaller groups. This paper presents an automated concept optimization method. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is used to optimize the generated conceptual candidate solutions automatically. a software prototype is developed and a case study of transmission mechanism of loading platform is detailed.