building knowledge management to support collaborative design

The present work shows an innovative Project Management Platform to support Collaborative Building Design, developed by the authors and partially implemented, aiming at creating a supporting instrument for Project Management Agencies. Referring to the industrial potential of this research, it aims at producing new software instruments for building management which will significantly reduce timing and costs in design process control, by reducing misunderstandings and conflicts among all the actors involved at any design phase. The interdisciplinary and dynamic nature of Architectural and Building Design clearly reveals the limits of conventional design in coping with the rapid changes taking place in this context in which many operators of this sector act. The authors propose a new Project Management Platform that can assist and support designers “in a collaborative fashion” supplying additional knowledge ‘on the fly' in order to enhance the entire design process and to reduce misunderstandings and code infringements by means of efficient, “intelligent” and designer-friendly support systems. The “fundamental bases of collaboration reside on knowledge and on the way it is communicated among the actors”. The authors propose an Overall Building Design Structure and a compact but powerful and flexible Knowledge Representation Model aimed at creating an innovative Project Management tool which allows mutual understanding among actors on shared design solutions. The system is based on a combination of Knowledge Representation based on Ontology representations and Design Process Management through Knowledge Scanning/Filtering systems. By means of the proposed platform Project Management Agencies can better control the exchanging protocols among actors involved, ensuring that any of them will receive shared concepts by others that he/she is able to understand and to work on efficiently. A partial implementation of the platform already exist and the ongoing research is focusing on a prototype implementation of the overall system and on final building users modeling, to test, even in preliminary design phases, the building response to final designed use.