Abstract: To further enhance and highlight the regional cultural characteristics of metro train appearance, an approach to exterior design for metro trains based on extension semantics and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation was proposed from the perspectives of experts and users. Firstly, according to the extension semantics, the concept of cultural primitives was defined, and the triples covering cultural carriers, cultural characteristics, and cultural values were constructed. For the exterior design process of metro trains, the extension semantic analysis and representation steps were provided. Then, the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was adopted to evaluate the cultural characteristics of the exterior design of metro trains, and the specific evaluation process was proposed as well. Finally, taking the exterior design of a low-speed B2 type Chengdu metro train as an example, the feasibility of the proposed approach was verified from three aspects: Culture extraction and representation, scheme design and scheme evaluation based on investigations on experts and users. The results show that the method could effectively integrate typical cultural elements into the exterior design of metro trains in the form of semantic symbols, and it would be helpful to improve the regional cultural characteristics of the design scheme.

Key words: metro train, design method, extension semantics, exterior design, regional culture