About NiCADa

Background

Many engineering designs, such as mould layout design, product family design, architectural floor plan layout design and so forth involve combinatorial layout design. Combinatorial layout design is critical because it significantly determines major cost and performance of design at early conceptual design stage. In industry, existing commercial CAD system packages are very powerful and have been widely used as a design tool that can provide plenty of standard libraries and automate some routine geometric features creation tasks to speed up the design cycle. However, they still require a lot of user interaction, and design quality still highly depends on human designer's knowledge and experience. Existing human-dependent manual methods and the shortage of experienced designers cause long design lead time, non-optimum layout designs and costly human errors.

Our Patent-Pending evolutionary design method and system for automation and optimisation of complex combinatorial layout design was originally created over 4 years of doctoral research on Intelligent Conceptual Mould Layout Design System at WMG of the University of Warwick. NiCADa Research & Development Co. Ltd. was founded to focus on further research, development and commercialisation of this innovative evolutionary design technology outside of the university.