  In recent years generative design techniques have become firmly established
in numerous applied fields, especially in engineering. These methods are
demonstrating intensive growth owing to promising outlook. However, existing
approaches are limited by the specificity of problem under consideration. In
addition, they do not provide desired flexibility. In this paper we formulate
general approach to an arbitrary generative design problem and propose novel
framework called GEFEST (Generative Evolution For Encoded STructure) on its
basis. The developed approach is based on three general principles: sampling,
estimation and optimization. This ensures the freedom of method adjustment for
solution of particular generative design problem and therefore enables to
construct the most suitable one. A series of experimental studies was conducted
to confirm the effectiveness of the GEFEST framework. It involved synthetic and
real-world cases (coastal engineering, microfluidics, thermodynamics and oil
field planning). Flexible structure of the GEFEST makes it possible to obtain
the results that surpassing baseline solutions.
