This article discusses building a computable design process model, which is a prerequisite for realizing intelligent computer-aided design systems. First, we introduce general design theory, from which a descriptive model of design processes is derived. In this model, the concept of metamodels plays a crucial role in describing the evolutionary nature of design. Second, we show a cognitive design process model obtained by observing design processes using a protocol analysis method. We then discuss a computable model that can explain most parts of the cognitive model and also interpret the descriptive model. In the computable model, a design process is regarded as an iterative logical process realized by abduction, deduction, and circumscription. We implemented a design simulator that can trace design processes in which design specifications and design solutions are gradually revised as the design proceeds.

Design has long been an area of particular interest for AI researchers. Herbert Simon's 1968 Karl Taylor Compton lectures on the sciences of the artificial included substantial material on design. However, only recently have design researchers embraced paradigms from AI and AI researchers chosen design as a domain to study.

Of what are minds made? Internal mental representations? Matter? In this provocative and engaging work (Simple Minds, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989, 266 pages, $25.00, ISBN 0-262-12140-9), Dan Lloyd seeks to provide answers that will bridge the gap between computational and connectionist models of the mind.

I appreciated very much the Spring 1990 issue of the AI Magazine on Robotic Assembly and Task Planning. It seems to me, however, that some good work that has been carried out on this subject in Europe during recent years has not been covered very much. Also commons on the low participation levels of women in the computer industry, suggestions for the inclusion of dissertation abstracts, comments on the Feldman article in the Fall 1990 issue, and a note about the discontinuance of plastic coverings on AI Magazine.

My Ph.D. dissertation describes an investigation of scientific reasoning from a computational perspective.

On January 13-14, 1990, a workshop organized by EDRC was held to discuss the topic of creating a scientific community at the interface between engineering design and AI, in order to identify problems and methods in the area that would facilitate the transfer and reuse of results. This report summarizes the workshop and follow-up sessions and identifies major trends in the field.

This article begins with an elaboration of models of design as a process. It then introduces and describes a knowledge representation schema for design called design prototypes. This schema supports the initiation and continuation of the act of designing. Design prototypes are shown to provide a suitable framework to distinguish routine, innovative, and creative design.

We include it here, behavior.

Gul A. Agha's "Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987, 144 pages, $25.00, ISBN 0-262-01092-5) is part of the MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence. This volume is edited by Patrick Winston, Michael Brady, and Daniel Bobrow.

I concentrate on this class of design 1989) that lays out the relation problems in this article. An example of an implicit function mapping from behavior to structure), typically in many engineering devices is safety: For conducted by means of a search or exploration example, a subsystem's role might only be in the space of possible subassemblies explained as something that prevents the of components. This accent on assembly is in leakage of a potentially hazardous substance, fact the origin of the frequent suggestion that and this function might never be explicitly design is a synthetic task. Only a vanishingly design specifications will usually mention a small number of objects in this space constitute number of constraints. The distinction even satisficing, not to mention optimal, between functions and constraints is hard to solutions. What is needed to make design formally pin down; functions are constraints practical are strategies that radically shrink on the behavior or properties of the device. However, it is useful to distinguish functions Set against the view of design as a deliberative from other constraints because functions are problem-solving process is the view of the primary reason that the device is desired. Artistic creations and weigh more than..."), the process of making scientific theories are often said by their creators the artifact from its description (manufacturability to have occurred to them in this Even when a plausible solution itself (for example, "I want a design within a occurs in this way, the proposal still needs to week"), and so on.