An Intelligent Assistant for architectural design studio (WEB edition)

Conscious design: explication of constraints and their consequences. Collaborative design: interaction among KB's of operators involved in architectural design. It seems by now fairly accepted by many researchers in the field of the Computer Aided Design that the way to realise support tools for the architectural design is by means of the realisation of Intelligent Assistants. This kind of computer program, based on the Knowledge Engineering and machine learning, finds his power and effectiveness by the Knowledge Base on which it is based. Moreover, it appears evident that the modalities of dialogue among architects and operators in the field of building industry, are inadequate to support the exchange of information that the use of these tools requires. In fact, many efforts at international level are in progress to define tools in order to make easier the multiple exchange of information in different fields of building design. Concerning this point, protocol and ontology of structured information interchanges constitute the first steps in this sense, e.g. those under standardisation by ISO (STEP), PDT models and Esprit project ToCEE. To model these problems it has brought forth a new research field: the collaborative design one, an evolution of distributed work and concurrent design. The CAAD Laboratory of Dipartimento di Architettura and Urbanistica per l'Ingegneria has carried out a software prototype, KAAD, based on Knowledge Engineering in the fields of hospital building and of building for aged people. This software is composed by an Interface, a Knowledge Base, a Database and Constraints. The Knowledge Base has been codified by using the formal structure of frames, and has been implemented by the Lisp language. All the elements of KB are objects KAAD does not check constraints after that design activity has been carried out, but during the design activity, also if it has not been completed in each its parts. This software is able to select and to analyse the instances created, and to understand the results of elaboration done, according to selected choices and activated constraints. Our objects are to model the interactions among operators involved in building design, to develop a framework software, Meta-KAAD, able to gather heterogeneous data in existent KB’s, manage specialised KB’s and control conflicts, in order to decrease conflicts and costs from collaborative design viewpoint.