“An approach to multidisciplinary product modeling and simulation through design-by-feature and classification trees”

This paper describes an approach for comparative evaluation of the response of a system in different domains in the early stage of the design process. The solution proposed here is based on the following ideas: feature based product representation, which serves as a 'shared product description'; estimation of the response of the system in a set of points (training points) through automatic simulation; categorization of the system response; generalization to other design regions through classification trees; evaluation of reliability. The result is an approximated 'model' of the system we are investigating. The level of detail of the model can be modified by changing the number of classes used to categorize the response.