Study on heredity and evolution of designs by using genetic algorithms

A new concept on 'heredity and evolution of designs' was developed by the author and a general algorithm to simulate the heredity and evolution of designs is presented in this study with reference to engineering analysis. The ordinary design process is considered here to have a distributed hierarchical structure and is modeled. The design in each level is optimized by the genetic algorithm to maximize the fitness function under some constraints. In some of the levels, engineering analysis can be involved. The fitness function and constraints to be used for the genetic algorithm in each level are modified by the resulting designs in the lower or upper level. The proposed method is applied to simple examples of car designs and demonstrated. Further studies will follow to examine and evaluate the proposed method from many points of view.