Methodology Discovery for Multi-disciplinary Design Problems

By design methodology we mean a specific scheme for organizing reasoning steps and domain knowledge to construct a solution for a particular problem in a particular domain. We are not referring to a general-purpose methodology for design. It provides both a conceptual framework for organizing design knowledge and a strategy for applying that knowledge [Sobolewski 1996]. It can provide the knowledge for decomposing the problem into sub-problems, synthesizing partial designs, evaluating and then combining them into partial designs, ordering design tasks, and discovering and resolving conflicts.