Design Entities and Associative Relationships (1)

• Every design problem may be expressed through a set of Design Parameters (DPs).

• DPs may refer to physical attributes of the design object, to functions that the designed system should perform, or to performance metrics.

• DPs may be either quantitative or qualitative.

• Associative relationships among DPs may be expressed in terms of computational formulas, empirical rules, selection matrices, experiment values etc.