An `AI in Design' View of Design
System Evaluation

Ease of Development

How difficult is it to develop such a system in terms of human effort and physical resources?
How difficult is it to collect and encode the knowledge required for a robust problem-solving process?

Discussion. The advantages of an automated design system must be traded off against the cost of its development. Human effort is essential, since the development of design systems requires advanced AI techniques combined with a thorough understanding of the design processes to be modelled. The physical resources are not negligible either, since the complexity of design problems often requires expensive hardware. Acquiring the knowledge encoded in the system also represents a major bottleneck. In most cases this knowledge is not available in the form needed for the design system. Usually the knowledge has to be extracted through interactive sessions or repeated discussions with domain experts, and then represented in a form which makes its use convenient for the system.

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