Pieter Pauwels

ABSTRACT Design space exploration (Woodbury and Burrow, 2006) is the activity of discovering and evaluating design alternatives. While this is one of the long-standing motivating ideas underlying computer-aided design (CAD) research, it gains renewed interest in the current context of increased emphasis on building performance. In order to meet specific performance requirements, a designer has to create and evaluate possible design alternatives and their performance. Information systems that can support this task of generating design alternatives can be beneficial, because they allow the designer to quickly evaluate alternatives and freely proceed in an open-ended process of discovery.

ABSTRACT Many building energy performance Simulation (BEPS) tools use custom schema definitions as opposed to standardised schema definitions (defined in XSD, EXPRESS, and so forth). A Simulation Domain Model (SimModel) was therefore previously developed and is representative of a new interoperable XML-based data model for the building simulation domain. In this paper we document our ongoing efforts to make building simulation data more interoperable with other building data. In order to better integrate SimModel information with other building information, the authors propose to represent this information in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A specialised conversion service parses the SimModel ontology, which is in the form of linked XSD schemata, and output a SimModel ontology in OWL. In this article, we further outline how the conversion service now also parses input SimModel XML files and outputs SimModel instances as RDF graphs. We briefly indicated how those SimModel RDF graphs can subsequently be used.

ABSTRACT Many building energy performance (BEP) simulation tools, such as EnergyPlus and DOE-2, use custom schema definitions (IDD and BDL respectively) as opposed to standardised schema definitions (defined in XSD, EXPRESS, and so forth). A Simulation Domain Model (SimModel) was therefore proposed earlier, representative for a new interoperable XML-based data model for the building simulation domain. Its ontology aims at moving away from tool-specific, non-standard nomenclature by implementing an industry-validated terminology aligned with the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). In this paper, we document our ongoing efforts to make building simulation data more interoperable with other building data. In order to be able to better integrate SimModel information with other building information, we have aimed at representing this information in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A conversion service has been built that is able to parse the SimModel ontology in the form of XSD schemas and output a SimModel ontology in OWL. In this article, we document this effort and give an indication of what the resulting SimModel ontology in OWL can be used for.

ABSTRACT Information technology support is hard to find for the early design phases of the architectural design process. Many of the existing issues in such design decision support tools appear to be caused by a mismatch between the ways in which designers think and the ways in which information systems aim to give support. We therefore started an investigation of existing theories of design thinking, compared to the way in which design decision support systems provide information to the designer. We identify two main strategies towards information system support in the early design phase: (1) applications for making design try-outs, and (2) applications as autonomous reasoning agents. We outline preview implementations for both approaches and indicate to what extent these strategies can be used to improve information system support for the architectural designer.

Computer-aided design (CAD) has been extended in various ways during the last decades. This evolution resulted in worldwide adoption in the domain of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), making CAD systems an essential tool for AEC specialists. However, ...

ABSTRACT Three-dimensional (3-D) geometry can be described in many ways, with both a varying syntax and a varying semantics. As a result, several very diverse schemas and file formats can be deployed to describe geometry, depending on the application domain in question. In a multidisciplinary domain such as the domain of architecture, engineering, and construction, this range of specialized schemas makes file format conversions inevitable. The approach adopted by current conversion tools, however, often results in a loss of information, most often due to a “mistranslation” between different syntaxes and/or semantics, leading to errors and limitations in the design conception stage and to inefficiency due to the required remodeling efforts. An approach based on semantic web technology may reduce the loss of information significantly, leading to an improved processing of 3-D information and hence to an improved design practice in the architecture, engineering, and construction domain. This paper documents our investigation of the nature of this 3-D information conversion problem and how it may be encompassed using semantic web technology. In an exploratory double test case, we show how the specific deployment of semantic rule languages and an appropriate inference engine are to be adopted to improve this 3-D information exchange. It shows how semantic web technology allows the coexistence of diverse descriptions of the same 3-D information, interlinked through explicit conversion rules. Although only a simple example is used to document the process, and a more in-depth investigation is needed, the initial results indicate the suggested approach to be a useful alternative approach to obtain an improved 3-D information exchange.

Experimenting' and 'observing' are crucial actions in architectural design thinking. They rely heavily on the representation environment used (e.g. sketching, scale models, sketch tools, CAD tools, etc.) and the 'game rules' at play in these environments. In this brief paper, we study the role of this representation environment in the overall architectural design thinking process. From this brief study, we indicate two design and implementation approaches to implement and design with such game rules in virtual design environments.

Figure 2. Left pane: Internal geometry for IfcSpaces, right pane: triangulation of curve set, addition of surface normal. All construction components, eg, walls, slabs, roofs, stairs, columns, Beams... are subtypes of the IfcBuildingElemententity, whichprovidesthegeomet-rical ...