Modèles et outils pour l'assistance à la conception. Application à la conception architecturale

Design assistance and more particularly Architectural design assistance offer a rich potential of applications for many research themes in computer science. The work, presented in this report, concerns several of these themes. At first, we present the general context of a design activity: the object, the process and actors. Then, we put our interest in the problem of modelling the design object during the design process and of taking into account of their evolution in a data model. The experiments realized in this study made it possible to highlight the limits of the object models to represent evolutive objects. By regarding the hypermedia approach as a flexible support for organization and information retrieval, which is adapted to the process of design, we present a design method of hypermedia allowing the user-designer to organize his field of competences in order to propose it to other designers. We illustrate the use of this method and highlight its limits with the presentation of some implementation examples. After having formulated the remark that the image occupies an important place in the architectural design, we present different uses in design assistance: technical information retrieval by image, the technological survey by image and the reference retrieval by image. The experiments realized allow us to consider some extensions about the method used and about the fields of investigation considered. Finally, in order to assist specific activities of design, which can be collective, and by considering the specificity of the activity of design, we propose, in the form of a meta-model, a representation of the cooperation context as well as a visualization of this context adapted to the visual representation of the architect. All these approaches were the subject of applications and experiments by implementing lastest information technologies.