Nandy Millan

Nandy Millan is Research Associate in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and part of the AutoTrain? and Euromotor projects.

Design Modularization in Nature

An important, industrially relevant problem is how a design task can be broken down into separate, semi-independend design tasks that can be worked on by different people. For example, in the motor industry, the parts produced by supply-chain companies are usually designed by the 'end-user' company. The supply chain companies often have specialist knowledge about the production process that would allow them to improve the designs. It is difficult to use this knowledge, though, because they may not have complete information about the environment a specific part will be used in, and a change in design of a specific part may require changes in other parts of the overall design. The school is already running a project, Co Design?, to look at techniques to improve the design interaction between different levels of the supply chain.

The intention of this topic is to look at what solutions natural systems could offer. Especially, we suggest to look into modularisation, and how evolution manages to optimize the separate parts of complex organisms. There are already quite a few people working on design modularization (e.g. in the evolutionary design of electronic circuits), but it would be worth looking again at what nature does, and also how specifically any ideas can be used in helping designers with different levels of design knowledge and responsibility. (In fact, the next topic will also fit into this).

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