Our paper titled “Part-Aware Product Design Agent Using Deep Generative Network and Local Linear Embedding”, led by PhD student Xingang Li, is recently nominated to receive the Best Paper Award by tracks on The 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. The work came out to be one of the very best of the 1,449 papers submitted for this year.

In this study, we present a data-driven generative design approach that can augment human creativity in product shape design with the objective of improving system performance. The approach consists of two modules: 1) a 3D mesh generative design module that can generate part-aware 3D objects using variational auto-encoder (VAE), and 2) a low-fidelity evaluation module that can rapidly assess the engineering performance of 3D objects based on locally linear embedding (LLE). This approach has two unique features. First, it generates 3D meshes that can better capture surface details (e.g., smoothness and curvature) given individual parts’ interconnection and constraints (i.e., part-aware), as opposed to generating holistic 3D shapes. Second, the LLE-based solver can assess the engineering performance of the generated 3D shapes to realize real-time evaluation. Our approach is applied to car design to reduce air drag for optimal aerodynamic performance.