DOMINIC I: PROGRESS TOWARDS DOMAIN INDEPENDENCE IN DESIGN BY ITERATIVE REDESIGN.

This paper describes the first working version of a program called Dominic that performs design by iterative redesign in a domain independent manner. The paper describes the program's strategy, which stresses the concept of redesign dependencies to guide its redesign process. Dominic has been succesfully tested in four different domains. Its performance on two of these is presented. The redesign class of design problems on which Dominic works is that large class of problems which are intellectually manageable and solvable without sub-division into smaller parts. This includes the various sub-problems ultimately created when large complex problems are decomposed for solution. Dominic is a hill climbing algorithm, similar to standard optimization methods. However, its problem formulation or input language is more flexible.