Mining design decision context to support product innovation design

In order to guide and inspire the designer’s thinking efficiently, this paper puts forward the concept of design decision context, which is an abstract expression of design rationale knowledge models by ignoring design trial-and-error processes and iterations. Design decision context is the core causality development path of design thinking. Based on the proposed fine-grained design rationale knowledge model, this paper proposes a design decision context mining method. The method includes individual design decision context mining and shared design decision context mining. Individual design decision context mining based on quotient space theory to reduce design rational knowledge model. A hierarchical design decision model is constructed, which can support the designer to analyze the design problem from different levels of granularity. Then, semantic reduction of the model is realized through the improved manifolds ranking method. The core design thinking process, i.e., design decision context, is obtained by eliminating the less relevant knowledge fragments. Shared design decision context mining by mapping design rationale knowledge models to petri net models, then, using α algorithm, mining shared design decision context petri net model from multiple individual design rationale knowledge models. Finally, the obtained petri net model is transformed into a shared design decision context model by inverse mapping. The proposed mining method is verified by yamagata punching die, pallet blanking die and automatic marking machine.