An Integrated Computing Environment for Collaborative, Multi-Disciplinary Building Design

Abstract

Abstract. The increasing complexity of the built environment requires that more knowledge and experience be brought to bear on its design, construction and maintenance. The commensurate growth of knowledge in the participating disciplines-architecture, engineering, construction management, facilities management, and others-has tended to diversify each one into many sub-specializations. The resulting fragmentation of the designbuilt-use process is potentially detrimental to the overall quality of built environment. An efficient system of collaboration between all the specialist participants is needed to offset the effects of fragmentation. It is here that computers, with their ubiquitous presence in all disciplines, can serve as a medium of communication and form the basis of a collaborative, multi-disciplinary design environment. This paper describes the ongoing research on the development of such an integrated computing environment that will provide the basis for design and evaluation tools ranging across the many building-related disciplines. The bulk of the discussion will focus on the problem of a building representation that can be shared by all these disciplines, which, we posit, lies at the core of such an environment. We discuss the criteria that characterize this shared building representation, and present our solution to the problem. The proposed model has been adapted from geometric modeling, and addresses explicitly the difficult problem of generality versus completeness of the represented information. The other components of the integrated environment that are under development are also described. The paper concludes with some implementation details and a brief look at two evaluation tools that use the proposed building representation for their task.

Intelligent representation for computer-aided building design

“…Nevertheless, it served as a good starting point and enabled us to test it with architecture-specific evaluation tools such as spatial layout, adjacencies, path-finding, etc. (Khemlani & Kalay 1997, Lee 1997). …”

“…It is the slab information associated with the floor and ceiling surfaces that allows the vertical position and the height of a space to be determined. In Version 1 of the PDB (Khemlani & Kalay 1997), there were two equal and opposite segments (i.e. edges) representing the wall surfaces on either side of a wall.…”

“…We have already tested the representation with some evaluation tools for architectural design (Khemlani & Kalay 1997, Lee 1997. These tools are just a precursor to more design and evaluation tools for other buildingrelated disciplines that we intend to develop.…”

Energy simulation for decision support in early architectural design

“…Efforts to foster collaboration via digital media thus far have concentrated on developing computer systems for the management and coordination of 3D building information, using one of two approaches (Kalay, 2009;Khemlani & Kalay, 1997). The first follows the enterprise computing strategy proposed by Aish (2000), and supports collaboration by providing a common project database that all disciplines interact with to create an integrated building design (Khemlani & Kalay, 1997). In addition to RUCAPS, early systems like OXSYS 11 , ICADS 12 and EDM 13 similarly adopted this approach (Khemlani & Kalay, 1997).…”

“…The first follows the enterprise computing strategy proposed by Aish (2000), and supports collaboration by providing a common project database that all disciplines interact with to create an integrated building design (Khemlani & Kalay, 1997). In addition to RUCAPS, early systems like OXSYS 11 , ICADS 12 and EDM 13 similarly adopted this approach (Khemlani & Kalay, 1997). While OXSYS and ICADS were special-purpose systems, both restricted in their range of application by a limited palette of components for design description (Khemlani & Kalay, 1997), EDM established a Generic Building Model that could be extended and customised to accommodate any building type or project (Eastman & Siabiris, 1995).…”