Mechanical-Design-Oriented Description Language: Model

Designing mechanical systems by means of special-purpose languages is very effective because they can define objects preciesly. However, this causes serious problems. First, the amount of description is very large in the case of designing complex systems. Second, those languages are not suited for modeling objects at higher abstraction levels. To solve these problems, this paper presents a novel description language for mechanical design called MODEL (Mechanical-design-Oriented DE scription Language). MODEL is designed in order that the designer's intentions can be efficiently reflected in the specifications of mechanical systems. We introduce a new concept, design granularity, so that designers can model objects of a mechanical system at different abstraction levels. Moreover, to reduce the amount of description, we use knowledge bases for mechanical design as a library for MODEL. The design process with MODEL is discussed in detail to clarify the capabilities of the language.