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Purpose The paper aims to raise awareness in the industry of design automation tools, especially in early design phases, by demonstrating along a case study the seamless integration of a prototypically implemented optimization, supporting design space exploration in the early design phase and an in operational use product configurator, supporting the drafting and detailing of the solution predominantly in the later design phase. Design/methodology/approach Based on the comparison of modeled as-is and to-be processes of ascent assembly designs with and without design automation tools, an automation roadmap is developed. Using qualitative and quantitative assessments, the potentials and benefits, as well as acceptance and usage aspects, are evaluated. Findings Engineers tend to consider design automation for routine tasks. Yet, prototypical implementations support the communication and identification of the potential for the early stages of the design process to explore solution spaces. In this context, choosing from and interactively working with automatically generated alternative solutions emerged as a particular focus. Translators, enabling automatic downstream propagation of changes and thus ensuring consistency as to change management were also evaluated to be of major value. Research limitations/implications A systematic validation of design automation in design practice is presented. For generalization, more case studies are needed. Further, the derivation of appropriate metrics needs to be investigated to normalize validation of design automation in future research. Practical implications Integration of design automation in early design phases has great potential for reducing costs in the market launch. Prototypical implementations are an important ingredient for potential evaluation of actual usage and acceptance before implementing a live system. Originality/value There is a lack of systematic validation of design automation tools supporting early design phases. In this context, this work contributes a systematically validated industrial case study. Early design-phases-support technology transfer is important because of high leverage potential.

We present an effective optimization strategy that is capable of discovering high-quality cost-optimal solution for two-dimensional (2D) path network layouts (i.e., groups of obstacle-avoiding Euclidean Steiner trees) that, among other applications, can serve as templates for complete ascent assembly structures (CAA-structures). The main innovative aspect of our approach is that our aim is not restricted to simply synthesizing optimal assembly designs with regard to a given goal, but we also strive to discover the best tradeoffs between geometric and domain-dependent optimal designs. As such, the proposed approach is centered on a variably constrained multi-objective formulation of the optimal design task and on an efficient coevolutionary solver. The results we obtained on both artificial problems and realistic design scenarios based on an industrial test case empirically support the value of our contribution to the fields of optimal obstacle-avoiding path generation in particular and design automation in general.

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