Partial order recursive abstraction for engineering design

Despite the potential value of representing design problems at multiple levels of abstraction, hierarchical model development for design is informally understood and applied. In this research we present a formal integrated recursive methodology to build abstraction hierarchies of a design parameter space. The objective is to produce loop-free abstractions without any backtracking across the levels of the abstraction hierarchy. The success of the methodology relies in eliminating backtracking and is largely dependent on the problem's context. The effectiveness of the developed methodology is demonstrated by an illustrative design problem.