Computer-aided design in urban development and management—A software for integrated planning and design by optimization

Planning and Design in Urban Development, consuming large Resources entailing many variables giving numerous solutions with large variations in resource-efficiency indicators, is a problem-solving process (Mitchell WJ. Computer-aided architectural design. New York: Petrocelli/Charter; 1977) involving search through numerous potential solutions to select a particular solution that meets a specified criteria, making computer-use indispensable. Planners/Designers (e.g. engineers/architects/planners) Commit huge Resources (e.g. money, land, materials), in their planning-design-decisions (i.e. planning function, 1 of 5 urban managerial functions) forming part of Integrated Urban Management (Chakrabarty BK. Urban management: concepts, principles, techniques and education. Cities, vol. 18/5. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science; 2001), enjoining on them an Ethical Responsibility/Accountability to the Society to achieve Productivity and Equity in Resources-Use so committed for a resource-efficient housing/urban problem solution. Operations Research (Optimization) and computer-aided design (CAD), are essential Techniques to improve Productivity (Koontz H, Weihrich H. Essentials of management. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company;1990; Koontz H, O’Donnel C. Management—a system and contingency analysis of managerial functions, New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company; 1976). Hence, it is vital that planners/designers apply (facilitated by modern computers) CAD/Optimization (even ancients applied Optimization) to discharge their above Accountability to the Society, for a Resource-Efficient and Equitable solution of housing/urban problems, in the context of rising population and dwindling Resources, particularly because we live in a Finite Earth with Finite Resources and no rational decision is really complete without Optimization. CAD primarily depends on: (i) system software—supplied with the hardware, and (ii) application software—available commercially or to be developed in-house. A number of descriptive/optimizing urban development models are developed and published earlier (Chakrabarty BK. Models for the optimal design of housing development systems. Environment and Planning B 17(33); 1990; Chakrabarty BK. Optimization in residential land subdivisions. Journal of Urban Planning and Development, American Society of Civil Engineers 117(1); 1991; Chakrabarty BK. Optimal design of multifamily dwelling development systems. Building and Environment 31(1); 1996; Chakrabarty BK. Urban management and optimizing urban development models. Habitat International 22(4); 1998). These are being converted into an Application Software to help apply Integrated CAD by Optimization to improve productivity and equity in housing and urban operations. The paper outlines the Application Software: HudCAD, which covers all four components of Integrated CAD (Hsu T, Sinha DK. Computer-aided design: an integrated approach. St.Paul: West Publishing Company; 1992) i.e. (i) geometric modeling (ii) design analysis/Design Optimization (iii) drafting/drawing, and (iv) data management, storage and transfer; rarely available in commercial CAD systems built primarily to perform geometric modeling/drafting. Application of HudCAD is illustrated with example problems. Addition of ‘‘Computer-Aided Planning and Design by Optimization’’ as a subject of study in the courses of existing disciplines of engineering/architecture/planning, rather than developing optimization specialists unable to comprehend the systems to be optimized, is suggested. This would equip such urban professionals to apply CAD by Optimization in housing/urban operations to achieve a Resource-Efficient and Equitable solution to our mounting housing and urban problems. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.