Design-OS: A Specification-Driven Framework for Engineering System Design with a Control-Systems Design Case
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the lack of systematicity in engineering system design, often caused by ambiguous requirements and poor traceability, as well as the prevailing focus of existing AI tools on solution generation rather than problem formulation. To bridge this gap, we propose Design-OS—a lightweight, specification-driven five-stage design process that ensures end-to-end traceability from conceptual to parametric representations through structured design artifacts. For the first time, we extend specification-driven human-AI collaboration from software to physical system design, integrating control theory with systems engineering principles. The framework enables human-AI co-execution via autonomous agents within a unified, auditable, and hardware-agnostic workflow. We demonstrate its generality and reproducibility on two rotary inverted pendulum platforms, with open-sourced templates and complete design artifacts significantly enhancing transparency and systematic rigor.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Engineering system design -- whether mechatronic, control, or embedded -- often proceeds in an ad hoc manner, with requirements left implicit and traceability from intent to parameters largely absent. Existing specification-driven and systematic design methods mostly target software, and AI-assisted tools tend to enter the workflow at solution generation rather than at problem framing. Human--AI collaboration in the design of physical systems remains underexplored. This paper presents Design-OS, a lightweight, specification-driven workflow for engineering system design organized in five stages: concept definition, literature survey, conceptual design, requirements definition, and design definition. Specifications serve as the shared contract between human designers and AI agents; each stage produces structured artifacts that maintain traceability and support agent-augmented execution. We position Design-OS relative to requirements-driven design, systematic design frameworks, and AI-assisted design pipelines, and demonstrate it on a control systems design case using two rotary inverted pendulum platforms -- an open-source SimpleFOC reaction wheel and a commercial Quanser Furuta pendulum -- showing how the same specification-driven workflow accommodates fundamentally different implementations. A blank template and the full design-case artifacts are shared in a public repository to support reproducibility and reuse. The workflow makes the design process visible and auditable, and extends specification-driven orchestration of AI from software to physical engineering system design.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
engineering system design
specification-driven design
human-AI collaboration
traceability
control systems
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
specification-driven design
human-AI collaboration
engineering system design
traceability
control systems
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