Creative design through knowledge clustering and case-based reasoning

New product design is inspired by the existing design. The clustering of similar design cases therefore enhances new product development (NPD). At the beginning of NPD, the success of creative design highly depends on the designers’ subjective judgments and try-and-error attempts due to its very obscure prospect. To facilitate an efficient approach for generating creative ideas, this paper proposes a new design method by integrating fuzzy relational analysis, case-based reasoning (CBR) and C-K theory. The proposed design method involves four specific sections: design criteria importance ranking; similarity measurement for design knowledge; knowledge clustering method for innovation and a step-by-step design algorithm. Moreover, a new battery buckling machinery is used as a empirical study to verify the workability of the proposed method. The contributed method shows its advantages to cultivate the inspirations from the existing design and generate creative design concepts from knowledge combination.