Extracting Cognitive Maps for Intelligent Conceptual Product Design

Cognitive maps represent decision makers’ mental maps and their strategies, which are always uncertain, ambiguous and hard to be formalized. In order to make intelligent design decision-making, a Bayesian approach for constructing cognitive maps is proposed in this paper. The cognitive map is modeled compatible with a Bayesian Network. Then cause-effect mapping rules between design elements embedded in cognitive maps can be made explicit by means of network structure learning. A score-based greedy search algorithm is implemented for network structure learning, in which penalized mutual information is defined as the scoring metric and hill-climbing search algorithm is used to find the highest-scoring network. The eliminating loop operator is introduced into the algorithm according to the restriction of the edge directionality.