Digitised engineering knowledge for prefabricated façades

Façade design is a multidisciplinary activity requiring the balancing of many conflicting design requirements. Very often, however, the designed façade does not respond to these requirement, as relevant design and manufacturing knowledge, normally originating downstream in the design process, is not properly used upstream in the process. The inability to respond to this challenge increases the environmental impact of the construction sector, which is currently covering nearly 40% of the global emissions. Also, improving the stagnant sector’s productivity is of paramount importance today, as it is deemed to be nearly as half as that of the manufacturing sector. This research has thus investigated ways to collect, store, represent and digitalise the engineering knowledge that underpins the design of façade products for façades that are better designed. The work has involved a close collaboration with the British general contractor (and façade manufacturer) Laing O’Rourke. The research has explored ways of using design and manufacturing knowledge and it has developed a digital tool and tested its functionalities. In the first part, after a review of the state-of-the-art in knowledge-based approaches in other fields, the digital tool, and relevant methodology, are developed. The tool informs the user about the expected performance and manufacturability of the façade product under analysis. The boundaries of traditional research were also pushed beyond the proof-of-concept by validating the digital tool in both simulated and real-world scenarios. The goal was to understand how people can develop a design solution while being supported by a digital tool. It was found that using such tool increases the user’s awareness about the consequences of the his/her choices in less time. In the last part of the research, the tool was used to develop a novel optimisation algorithm, by including considerations about aesthetics and manufacturability, in parallel with the traditional performance-based approach. The application of the algorithm to a case study has shown that it is possible to improve existing solutions in terms of performance, without affecting aesthetic and manufacturability significantly.EPSRC, Laing O'Rourk

Towards facades as Make-To-Order products – the role of Knowledge-Based-Engineering to support design

Building façades are Engineer-To-Order (ETO) products and, as such, they show unique features on a project-by-project basis. The partitioning of design tasks during the design and manufacturing process of these products, however, does not fully capture how specific design decisions influence other stakeholders’ choices. This lack of design integration is most severe at early stages when a large proportion of initial costs, mostly driven by manufacturability aspects, is determined. This paper illustrates a methodology to build Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) applications to support early-stage design integration through the development of a façade Product Model for automatic rule checking and knowledge reuse. The main outcome is a preliminary framework for developing knowledge-based, digital tools to support and integrate façade design as well as different scenarios in which the tool can potentially be used, based on two types of procurement methods. A prototype of the tool is also shown here. The paper proposes a new paradigm where façade systems are considered to be more closely related to Make-To-Order types, rather than ETOs, in which the product is ready for fabrication and designers can rapidly explore the subcontractor’s manufacturing capabilities and the implications of their design choices. Future work will include tool validation by applying the tool into a specific façade manufacturer’s workflow