Abstract: On the basis of Axiomatic design (AD) theory, several key techniques for generating conceptual design schemes of mechanical products are studied. Customer – driven issue of conceptual design is discussed. It proposes a strategy for establishing the mapping from customer domain to functional domain. The concept of Domains Structure Template which is directed against the defects of AD is proposed to extend AD, and concept space and concept reasoning network are constructed. Effective Concept Space is filtered out by restraint reasoning from concept reasoning network, and effective concept space resolving algorithm is symbolically described. The functional relationships between design entities involved in individual scheme are analyzed based on conceptual graphs. A high speed chainstitch sewing machine is used as a case study to show the effectiveness of the proposed method and associated algorithms.

Key words: Axiomatic design, Conceptual design, Decomposition algorithm, Domains structure template