A framework for modeling and communicating abstractions of constructed facilities

Management of information about constructed facilities in a computer-integrated environment is a challenging task because this information evolves from and is viewed by many different disciplines throughout the facility's lifecycle. We present a general framework for modeling and reasoning about the components of a constructed facility at any desired level of abstraction, and communicating the information across disciplines at any stage in the lifecycle of the facility, as well as across stages. Our research has been motivated by an objective similar to that of STEP, which intends to establish an international protocol for the exchange of CAD data. The descriptive information about a facility is divided into two separate but linked groups: spatial and non-spatial attributes. The primary emphasis of this research is to provide a single, uniform representation and reasoning paradigm for dealing with the various spatial abstractions of the facility components regardless of their geometric dimensionalities. Submitted to CAAD futures ' 91, ETH Zurich. Zamanian and Fenves 1,