Paper ID: 2209.12793

Material Prediction for Design Automation Using Graph Representation Learning

Shijie Bian, Daniele Grandi, Kaveh Hassani, Elliot Sadler, Bodia Borijin, Axel Fernandes, Andrew Wang, Thomas Lu, Richard Otis, Nhut Ho, Bingbing Li

Successful material selection is critical in designing and manufacturing products for design automation. Designers leverage their knowledge and experience to create high-quality designs by selecting the most appropriate materials through performance, manufacturability, and sustainability evaluation. Intelligent tools can help designers with varying expertise by providing recommendations learned from prior designs. To enable this, we introduce a graph representation learning framework that supports the material prediction of bodies in assemblies. We formulate the material selection task as a node-level prediction task over the assembly graph representation of CAD models and tackle it using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Evaluations over three experimental protocols performed on the Fusion 360 Gallery dataset indicate the feasibility of our approach, achieving a 0.75 top-3 micro-f1 score. The proposed framework can scale to large datasets and incorporate designers' knowledge into the learning process. These capabilities allow the framework to serve as a recommendation system for design automation and a baseline for future work, narrowing the gap between human designers and intelligent design agents.

Submitted: Sep 26, 2022