Intelligent Structures for Collaborating with the Architect

Abstract

The number of different designers with different competencies collaborating in a building project is today conspicuous. An undesired consequence is the possible rise of conflicts between decisions taken independently by more than one specialist on the same building object. The early detection of such conflicts is then one of the most important features in collaborative design. Moreover, of great interest would be the possibility not only of automatic detection but also of solution proposal of at least the most manageable of those conflicts. In this perspective smart models of building components could be very useful. This is possible giving the building elements, represented as objects, the specific intelligence. A simple example of this possibility is given in this paper. In a precedent work we proposed a way of managing elementary spatial conflicts between building components tending to occupy the same spaces. The automatic detection derived from the previous declaration of two levels of constraints (soft constraint and hard constraints) in such way that a violation of them could be immediately signaled to the actor wanting to take the decision triggering the conflict. In this paper the topic is the consequences of the rise of a spatial conflict (occupation of the same space) between a column of a spatial frame of columns and beams, and another building object of any sort subject to a soft or hard constraint. The procedure identifies the minimum displacement of the two objects, propagates the column displacement to the other structural elements connected to it and checks the feasibility of the new configuration of the structural schema both with regard to the possible rise of new conflicts and with the compliance to previous structural criteria