Research on a Novel Analogical Reasoning Method for Biomimetic Concept Generation

Biologically inspired design is helpful for inspiring novel product design solutions. Currently, researchers mainly focus on biological knowledge representation and retrieval methods at a macroscopic level. At the same time, they need to pay more attention to systematic analogical reasoning method research and thus require an intelligent, biologically inspired design approach. To solve these problems, this paper presents a systematic analogical reasoning approach called Transformation-Mapping-Analogy Design (TMAD) to support biologically inspired design intelligently. Our proposed method derives its intelligence by integrating functional modeling for knowledge representation, knowledge clustering for knowledge acquisition, and design analogizing for creative concept generation. The approach also naturally reduces the workload in dealing with massive knowledge and providing more accurate, helpful knowledge. A design case is given to illustrate that the proposed algorithm can successfully achieve intelligent biologically inspired design.