Automated modeling to support design

Abstract: "The need to consider a number of different alternatives at an early stage in design has been well established. It is hypothesized that providing a tool for automatically modeling and analyzing behavior of an artifact would aid the conceptual designer by facilitating the consideration of more varied alternatives. We describe a tool for automatic formulation of dynamic system models from user specified interconnection of components. The underlying methods are based on Bond Graph formalism using causal reasoning to simplify the model. The simplified model is not only more tractable for analysis and simulation but also facilitates inferences about the dominant characteristics of the designed artifact."