A note on flow networks and structures

technical repor

A methodology for the evaluation of designs for Standards conformance

technical repor

Role of database management systems in structural engineering

technical repor

The use of artificial intelligence techniques in preliminary structural design

technical repor

Application of a reduced quadratic programming technique to optimal structure design

Technical Repor

An integrated software environment for building design and construction

technical repor

Knowledge-based expert systems in structural design

technical repor

Role of artificial intelligence and knowledge-base expert system methods in civil engineering

Present use of computers in civil engineering is largely devoted to numeric, algorithmic calculations. This mode is not appropriate for the empirical, heuristic, ill-structured problems of civil engineering practice. The paper reviews recent work in Artificial Intelligence and Expert systems addressing these latter issues, identifies the distinctive features of engineering knowledge based systems, the roles of such systems, and attempts to predict their evolution

Adjacency structures as mappings between function and structure in discrete static systems

Abstract: "One view of the design process is that design is a mapping from functional requirements to artifact description. This article presents initial work on a method for mapping between functional requirements and a description of the physical structure of discrete static systems. The representation consists of a set of atomic elements, a hierarchy of compound components from the domain, and the composition ofa graph of adjacent atomic elements. Through forward or backward chaining, this method may be used in a parsing mode to discover the behavior and function of a given system, or in a generative mode to suggest instances of systems which can be used to satisfy the desired functionality.Parsing discovers the behavior of the system in terms of the compound components by matching on subgraphs within the overall adjacency graph. Generation hierarchically instantiates subgraphs which satisfy the initial functional requirements and the requirements propagated by previously instantiated components. The graph is composed from a geometric model, but the method is independent of the specific representation used by the geometric modeler. We focus on the domain of structural systems in buildings to describe this method.

Integrating spatial and functional data in a prototype solids grammar of tall building design

Abstract: "Spatial grammars and solids modeling have both contributed to the expansion of computer representable abstractions from numerical and symbolic data into the realm of spatial data. Spatial grammars, such as Stiny's shape grammars, have focused on representing and transforming this spatial data. However, to date spatial and non-spatial data have not been fully integrated into an engineering design process. We describe a grammar which uses a solids modeling representation with object-attribute-value labels. The objects in this label data structure are any of the topological elements of the solids model. Through this enriched representation we demonstrate the extensibility of the grammar formalism into engineering disciplines bound by functional constraints. The grammar presented is a prototype implementation intended to demonstrate the relevant domain variables as well as the nature of their interaction in driving the design process. We describe the grammar and discuss the lessons we have learned from its development and critique.