A Mechanism For Capturing Implicit Design Knowledge In Building Information Models Using Graph Transformations

With the increasing adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM), Computer Assisted Design has become a vital tool in every lifecycle phase of a building. Creating a Building Information Model however is also time consuming and costly. Computational Design Synthesis (CDS) is a research field which tries to automate the Computer Aided Design process by formalizing implicit design knowledge, making it explicit. A possible barrier for its adoption however is the additional skill required for formalizing the design knowledge, which is not a typical part of e.g. architecture education. This work is concerned with seamlessly integrating the formalization of implicit design knowledge using graph transformations into the design process. We first show how buildings can be represented as graphs and how the formal concept of graph transformations can be used define modifications on these building graphs. The software tool GrGen (Geiß et al., 2006) is used to demonstrate how to implement and apply graph transformation rules. We proceed to present a conceptual mechanism allowing the automatic generation of graph transformation rules from a user-selected part of an existing Building Information Model. These graph transformation rules capture the implicit design knowledge which went into the creation the of existing model. The rules can then be applied in a different context (in the same or a different building model) to automate the design process. The main advantage of our generation mechanism is that it allows the usage of the graph transformation formalism without requiring knowledge or skill in it. Our presentation of the generation mechanism has two parts: 1. A formal definition of the generation mechanism based on graph theory. 2. A discussion on how this generation mechanism can be integrated into a BIM design workflow. We complement our conceptual framework with a software prototype implementing the rule generation from a given building graph using the GrGen API.     «

With the increasing adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM), Computer Assisted Design has become a vital tool in every lifecycle phase of a building. Creating a Building Information Model however is also time consuming and costly. Computational Design Synthesis (CDS) is a research field which tries to automate the Computer Aided Design process by formalizing implicit design knowledge, making it explicit. A possible barrier for its adoption however is the additional skill required for for...     »