Models of the Early Stage in Digital Design

The article discusses the issues and outlines ways to address them related to the early stage of any design, the selection of the layout of the final product. Scientifically grounded choice of layout is a complex process. It requires not only the use of information technology, but more importantly, the use of expert knowledge in the process. There must be a clear understanding of what a layout is, what a layout element is, what a structure is, what a composition is, and how it all interrelates. A wealth of historical experience in design, must be gathered and adapted for automated synthesis. This applies especially to the stage of selecting and justifying the layout of the designed product. This knowledge must be evaluated, systematized, and uniformly formulated for unambiguous understanding by users. A clear structure of presentation will allow to formalize expert knowledge in the form of rules for its further use in automated synthesis. This article does not provide specific rules and algorithms for evaluating the quality of a rule, although they exist and have been developed. The rules for each subject area will be different, and the criteria for assessing the rules for each subject area will also be different. The article deals with the sequence of rules and their docking with automated synthesis. But most importantly, the docking stage is very important and should not be ignored at the initial stage.