The reuse of existing design models offers great potential in saving resources and generating an efficient workflow. In order to fully benefit from these advantages, it is necessary to develop methods that are able to retrieve mechanical engineering geometry from a query input. This paper aims to address this problem by presenting a method that focuses on the needs of product development to retrieve similar components by comparing the geometrical similarity of existing parts. Therefore, a method is described, which first converts surface meshes into point clouds, rotates them, and then transforms the results into matrices. These are subsequently passed to a pre-trained Deep Learning network to extract the feature vector. A similarity between different geometries is calculated and evaluated based on this vector. The procedure employs a new type of part alignment, especially developed for mechanical engineering geometries. The method is presented in detail and several parameters affecting the accuracy of the retrieval are discussed. This is followed by a critical comparison with other shape retrieval approaches through a mechanical engineering benchmark data set.

Reinforcement Learning has proven to be capable of solving complex tasks like playing video games, robotics control, speech or image recognition and processing. Transferring Reinforcement Learning into engineering design helps to overcome two current issues of data-driven Design Automation in engineering design. First, dealing with sparse training data resulting from differing design samples. Second, overcoming the limited number of samples in the training data as consequence of short or insufficient product history. To introduce an alternative approach for Design Automation, this contribution studies feasibility, training effort and transferability of Reinforcement Learning in engineering design. The presented method maps engineering requirements and parametric models into learning environments and provides a novel approach for design automation. In addition to that, the contribution summarises the hyperparameters, which design engineers have to set prior to training, and introduces a novel transfer learning concept for Reinforcement Learning in related design tasks. The support is probed by design tasks of performance-oriented bike parts. Case-independent indicators are presented to estimate the case-specific training effort, the effects of hyperparameter variation and the effects of transferring a pretrained agent to related design tasks. Finally, the findings are used to compare Reinforcement Learning to other data-independent Design Automation approaches to assess potential fields of application for Reinforcement Learning in engineering design.