UML-based Modeling of Architectural Knowledge and Design

We introduce a UML-based model for conceptual design support in civil engineering. Therefore, we identify required extensions to standard UML. Class diagrams are used for elaborating building typespecific knowledge: Object diagrams, implicitly contained in the architect’s sketch, are validated against the defined knowledge. To enable the use of industrial, domain-specific tools, we provide an integrated conceptual design extension. The developed tool support is based on graph rewriting. With our approach architects are enabled to deal with semantic objects during early design phase, assisted by incremental consistency checks.