Communicative Acts in Cooperative Architectural Design Environments

The purpose of this paper is to present a scheme, that can be used to support the communication process in cooperative design. Computational aids for design have largely been for a designerworking by himself/herself. These aids have also been supplemented by the widespread use of artificial intelligence approaches. However, design is so complex, and very rarely acted upon by a single designer but many more working towards the same aim. This involves a new paradigm in which designers need to cooperate with each other using a computational medium. A protocol analysis in cooperative design has been carried out and technological support has been proposed.Cooperative design becomes an important paradigm for the next generation of intelligent computer aided design systems. It will be conducted in many forms among several designers and willrequire the support of advanced communication facilities beyond the “passivei transmission of data and messages. Technological advances in communication networks have opened up new ways for cooperative design interaction across several processes of cooperation among designers, designers and computer aided design systems, computer aided design systems and knowledge based systems, and knowledge based systems themselves. In cooperative design environments, aunit of communication among designers is the transfer of a message from one designer (a sender) to another (a receiver). The aim of such communication is to provide the receiver with some information or to have the receiver take certain actions. Inspired by the speech act theory, a branch of the philosophy of language and linguistics, such a unit is called a communicative act. By analogy to architectural design, a communicative act is a performing act in designers communication

Towards collaborative creative design

The paper presents a design support system for collaborative work based upon the composite knowledge representation. It addresses the main challenges of distributed environment: ensuring a convenient access to the common data by multiple users and maintaining consistency of such data. The main idea is to couple the design support system implemented in C/C++ with the knowledge database using the ODBC library developed by the Microsoft. The ability of the proposed system is demonstrated on several examples.

The COSMOS integrated IT solution at railway and motorway construction sites - Two case studies

This paper presents two case studies on installations of the COSMOS Integrated IT Solution, which we developed to provide "COnstruction Site Mobile Operations Support". We first give an overview of the entire system, discussing our network architecture, applications, workflow solution, and middleware, and then describe how COSMOS was deployed and used at a motorway and a railway construction site. Key effects on the construction companies ' business operations are reported

An Experimental Environment for Exchanging Engineering Design Knowledge By Cognitive Agents

Large engineering design projects involve many different disciplines each with their own area of concern and expertise. A large amount of information (design data and knowledge) is processed and exchanged among such disciplines, and even within each discipline. Traditional computer environments cannot cope easily with such complex situations. Hence new approaches must be sought. This paper presents an experimental design environment organized as a population of asynchronous cognitive agents. Issues about the general architecture, the internal structure of an agent and inter-agent communication mechanism are discussed. A prototype including a number of independent agents is then presented and demonstrated on a small mechanical design. Keywords Cognitive Agents, Engineering Design Knowledge, CAD, Mechanical Design. 1 INTRODUCTION Large engineering design projects require the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using sophisticated and powerful engineering tools such as comme..