A novel function-structure concept network construction and analysis method for a smart product design system

The rapid growth of data and the requirement of designers to track massive data to obtain design stimuli have posed challenges to conceptual design, thereby promoting the development of data-driven design. Concept networks precisely capture design information from a large volume of unstructured and heterogeneous textual data and saliently decrease time and labor cost for designers to read texts, which creates new opportunities for developing a smart product design system. To advance data-driven design, this study proposes the novel function-structure concept network (FSCN) construction method, which combines sentence parsing and word/phrase extraction to integrate functional and structural information. Furthermore, a network analysis method is proposed to explore design information associations that contain both explicit and implicit associations together and thereby recommend them simultaneously to designers as inspirational stimuli to support design ideation. This approach can enhance designers' capabilities to build associations between design information, conceive new design ideas during conceptual design, and increase creativity for solving design problems. The proposed FSCN construction and analysis method can be used as an auxiliary tool to visualize associations among design information so as to inspire idea generation in the early stage of conceptual design. An illustrative example was used to validate the practicability of the proposed methodology. The code of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/KWflyer/FSCN .