Conference Agenda

Data-Driven Design (DDD) is emerging as a transformative approach in engineering design, leveraging AI tools to extract knowledge from design data that drive product development and innovation. While large language models have advanced DDD through the analysis of textual data, technical drawings remain largely unexplored. To address the limitations of current vision-language models, this study presents a novel object detection pipeline that automatically identifies components in patent images, enabling data-driven analysis of component geometries, interfaces, and spatial configurations.

Patents contain valuable design insights, yet manual analysis remains time-consuming and complex. This study explores Large Language Models’ capacity to automate patent analysis for engineering design. GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro were evaluated across Motivation, Novelty, and Key Invention Features using three patents and expert evaluators assessed outputs through Accuracy & Fidelity, Comprehensiveness, and Analytical Depth. Results indicate LLMs demonstrate proficiency in feature synthesis but exhibit inferential limitations in motivation analysis, underscoring the necessity for human oversight.

Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) capture dependencies between system entities and help analyze system complexity, but manually creating them from unstructured documents is time consuming. This work proposes an automated DSM extraction framework using LLMs and RAG with an explicit reasoning step before the LLM determines the presence of a dependency between two system entities. Using a hand-curated dataset, we evaluate three LLM models (GPT-4o-mini, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4o) across six performance metrics and cost.The findings show that reasoning length affects LLM's DSM extraction performance.

This study evaluates the efficacy of various freely available Large Language Models (LLMs) in conducting semi-automated purpose-oriented technology searches to support design activities as well as Technology Intelligence for innovation management, using a systematic manual search as a baseline for comparison. The case to run the comparison focuses on identifying water purification technologies suitable for mobile systems. The results show that LLMs can target more technologies than human-based searches, reducing time demands and providing wider entry points for additional technology analysis.