BIKAS: Bio-Inspired Knowledge Acquisition and Simulacrum—A Knowledge Database to Support Multifunctional Design Concept Generation

A detailed acquisition, analysis, and representation of biological systems exhibiting different functions is required to develop unique bio-inspired multifunctional conceptual designs and methods. This paper presents BIKAS: Bio-inspired Knowledge Acquisition and Simulacrum, a knowledge database of biological systems exhibiting various functionalities, developed based on case-based bio-inspired examples from literature. The knowledge database represents the biological features, their characteristics, and the function exhibited by the biological feature as a combination of its integrated structure and structural strategy. Furthermore, this knowledge database is utilized by the Expandable Domain Integrated Design (xDID) model that works on classifying, mapping, and representing biological features into their respective geometric designations called Domains. The combination of features from the Domains results in the generation of multifunctional conceptual designs. In addition, Meta-level design factors are proposed to aid designers in filtering the biological features and their respective functions having a similar structural strategy, thus aiding designers in rapidly selecting and emulating biological functions.