Evaluating Physical and Spatial Requirements of Apartment Unit Floor Plans

This paper demonstrates an experience in the development of a design performance evaluation system that can frequently evaluate building design performance within the design process in a real-time manner. The evaluation system, that we call "Vitruvius Studio," is composed of several modules such as a front-end component-based CAD engine, a knowledge base, and a set of design agents. While a computer programmer compiles a set of programming codes to check compiling errors during the implementation of a software system, an architectural designer can 'compile' his/her intermediate design product to evaluate design errors during the design process. The compilation can be done immediately at any level or any time during the design process in a real-time manner. We expect that this compiling process will dramatically increase design feedbacks, and thus result in a better design product. INTRODUCTION This paper demonstrates an experience in the development of a design performance evaluation system that can frequently evaluate building design performance within the design process in a real-time manner. The evaluation system, that we call " Vitruvius Studio," is composed of three main modules such as a front-end component-based CAD engine, a knowledge base, and a set of design agents. The notion of the Vitruvius Studio is quite similar to a compiler for computer programming such as a C compiler. While a computer programmer compiles a set of programming codes to check compiling errors during the implementation of a software system, an architectural designer can 'compile' his/her intermediate design product to evaluate design errors during the design process. The compilation can be done immediately at any level or any time during the design process. We expect that this compiling process will dramatically increase design feedbacks, and thus result in a better design product. To evaluate a design, we first define "design faults" that can be categorized in many criteria levels such as components, relationships between components including spatial relationships, or more high-level criteria (space depth, circulation, visibility, etc.). An architectural design can be efficiently defined by a well-defined floor plan in which building components belonging in it and even spatial networks are well represented. To do this, we developed a front-end standalone CAD engine, called StrPLAN (Choi, 2001). The floor plan editing module is based on a robust building data model that includes hierarchical building components such as 'building', 'plan', 'space', 'ring', 'wall skeleton', 'surface', 'column', etc. The creation algorithm developed assures a semantically rich and structurally correct floor plan at any point in the design process. Particularly, the floor plan constructed through the design process contains spatial information as well as other design information about the building components. Thus, the system effectively manages spatial design information in the real-time basis. Since the system implemented on the basis of the algorithm is the very first step toward a complete intelligent CAD system, research and development issues to be considered next are identified at the end of the paper. A knowledge base is composed of a set of design knowledge that can be used in the evaluation process to check design violation. For example, "Each room must have a door" can be a simple design knowledge. As this knowledge is computationally stored in an object-oriented database (so we call it a knowledge base), a design agent can evaluate whether each room has at least a door or not. A set of design agents is also under development. This paper demonstrates some of them that are successfully developed so far. These design agents can check the following design faults: proper location of components, proportion and size of components (e.g. the size and proportion of a room, the size of window, etc.), belongings of components (e.g. the number of doors in a room), spatial adjacency, spatial (door and window) connectivity, the degree of spatial integration by calculating space depth, wayfinding and evacuation, and circulation. Eighth International IBPSA Conference Eindhoven, Netherlands August 11-14, 2003