Recently, I've been looking recently into what uses AI - specifically evolutionary algorithms - may have in automating engineering design. For a long time, there have been algorithms that solve constraint satisfaction problems, and, to me, it makes sense to consider engineering problems as a superset of constraint satisfaction problems. In spite of this, I haven't been able to find any cases of engineering design being automated other than a couple of cases of genetic algorithms being used to optimise structural members.
So my question is, why can't I find any examples?
The first thing that springs to mind is that I just haven't been looking hard enough - if this is the case, could anyone point me in the right direction?
The other obvious answer is that it isn't a widely researched area - if so, why not? Is it just due to lack of interest or are there technical hurdles (abstraction, complex logic & reasoning, etc.) that make this a much more difficult problem than computer vision, games, and so on?