Learning Symbolic Formulations in Design Optimization

This paper presents a learning and inference mechanism for unsupervised learning of semantic concepts from purely syntactical examples of design optimization formulation data. Symbolic design formulation is a tough problem from computational and cognitive perspectives, requiring domain and mathematical expertise. By conceptualizing the learning problem as a statistical pattern extraction problem, the algorithm uses previous design experiences to learn design concepts. It then extracts this learnt knowledge for use with new problems. The algorithm is knowledge-lean, needing only the mathematical syntax of the problem as input, and generalizes quickly over a very small training data set. We demonstrate and evaluate the method on a class of hydraulic cylinder design problems.