Interactive Distributed Knowledge Support for Conceptual Building Design

In our project, we develop new tools for the conceptual design phase. During conceptual design, the coarse functionality and organization of a building is more important than a detailed worked out construction. We identify two roles, first the knowledge engineer who is responsible for knowledge definition and maintenance; second the architect who elaborates the conceptual design. The tool for the knowledge engineer is based on graph technology, it is specified using PROGRES and the UPGRADE framework. The tools for the architect are integrated to the industrial CAD tool ArchiCAD. Consistency between knowledge and conceptual design is ensured by the constraint checker, another extension to ArchiCAD

GraCAD - Graph-Based Tool for Conceptual Design

This paper proposes a new methodology for computer-aided design of layouts of buildings. The presented methodology addresses the very early phase of designing that is called Conceptual Design. In this methodology the architect does not pay attention to layout details, but operates on functional requirements, constraints, and high-level architectural concepts such as functional areas and rooms. The GraCAD system realizes this methodology by adding a high-level design tool to the wellknown commercial program ArchiCAD. This design tool has been realized using graph-based knowledge representation techniques and graph grammars as offered by the system PROGRES. Preliminary results show that the developed ArchiCAD add-on and the formalism of graph grammars seems to be useful in aiding architectural design