An Integrated Computing Environment for Collaborative, Multi-Disciplinary Building Design

The increasing complexity of the built environment requires that more knowledge and experience be brought to bear on its design, construction and maintenance. The commensurate growth of knowledge in the participating disciplines-architecture, engineering, construction management, facilities management, and others-has tended to diversify each one into many sub-specializations. The resulting fragmentation of the design-built-use process is potentially detrimental to the overall quality of built environment. An efficient system of collaboration between all the specialist participants is needed to offset the effects of fragmentation. It is here that computers, with their ubiquitous presence in all disciplines, can serve as a medium of communication and form the basis of a collaborative, multi-disciplinary design environment. This paper describes the ongoing research on the development of such an integrated computing environment that will provide the basis for design and evaluation tools ranging across the many building-related disciplines. The bulk of the discussion will focus on the problem of a building representation that can be shared by all these disciplines, which, we posit, lies at the core of such an environment. We discuss the criteria that characterize this shared building representation, and present our solution to the problem. The proposed model has been adapted from geometric modeling, and addresses explicitly the difficult problem of generality versus completeness of the represented information. The other components of the integrated environment that are under development are also described. The paper concludes with some implementation details and a brief look at two evaluation tools that use the proposed building representation for their task.