Visual exploration for assessing design variants
Project leader: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Petzold, TU Munich
Background
Decisions taken at early phases of architectural design have a significant effect on the planning steps for the entire lifetime of the project as well as the performance of the building throughout its lifecycle. However, the architect today almost exclusively uses his know-how for evaluating and comparing design variants. But then the architect as the designer is indeed no expert in various fields of analysis and simulations needed for evaluating a design alternative.
This part project focuses on finding new ways to facilitate the use of analytical and simulation tools during the important early phases of conceptual building design, where the digital models are partially incomplete. The necessary enrichment and proper detailing of the design model could be achieved through dialogue-based interaction concepts with analytical and simulation tools through adaptive detailing strategies. The focus of this part project (TP3) is twofold, one to establish a generic dialog-based interface to various simulation tools, and the other to develop methods for visual exploration and easy to understand evaluations of design variants based on simulation results.
Concept
In order to achieve a simulation-based assessment for the meaningful evaluation of design variants, certain data with a definite depth of information and reliability are required for the calculations and analysis. Based on a digital building model, essential information can be determined and used for the simulation. The requirements depend on the chosen analysis method, the necessary detailing and the desired result quality (level of accuracy). If the available depth of information is not sufficient for a particular simulation, the simulation model can request or suggest further details. The responses from the simulations must be prepared and visualised in a transparent and comprehensible way.
Adaptive Minimized Computer-Readable Communication Protocol based on BIM
A large portion of the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry still deals with conventional methods to exchange design information. The growing use of building information models is promising, but even the most recent developments and practices still rely heavily on human-readable protocols and issue management systems. Considering the potential of schematized computer-readable communications to be analyzed and used for future references and case-based reasoning systems, this part project proposed a novel minimized communication protocol based on BIM, which aims to introduce a computer-readable, yet adaptive universal method which works on schematized information exchange requirements (templates) for different use cases.
The proposed communication system is consisting of two parts. One part would be an issue tracking system or so-called ticketing system. Via this part, just like any other ticketing system, requests and responses will be managed, and their progress will be controlled. Priorities can be set for each ticket, and their responsive person can also be traced back. Various tags can be assigned to tickets which makes the coordination and communication more seamless and transparently traceable. The other part would contain the feedback provided by various consultants and domain experts. Based on the explicit exchange requirements needed for each analysis (examples in our research group are the TP4-Energy & TP5-Structural analysis) a specific schema is defined for each analysis (using the requirements planning via TP1’s Multi-LOD Meta Model) that contains all the essential components (spatial and semantical building components) with their corresponding crucial attributes and LOD within the BIM data model. This part uses an adaptive signature function called ‘Feedback’ to exchange the missing information along with suggested values for them as options. This signature function based on its use case will receive different arguments. The feedback function in its general form is as follows:
feedback (actionType, optionGroupID, GUID, aLODx, ComponentID, PropertyID, value)
A plugin for Autodesk Revit that supports the above mentioned communication protocol and the multi-LOD metamodel was also implemented as a prototype.
Interactions and visual representations in the feedback process
Considering the visualization as an essential part of communication and exploration, in order to ensure good collaboration between different actors, various visualization techniques are tested in order to properly show the outcome of the model checking to the architect indicating the shortcomings of his design model.
Variant evaluation and comparison play a significant role in supporting the decision-making process of the architect during the early stages of building design. Among the users’ wishes, stated by interviewees, was to include the history of design in the form of a tree or graph including all variants (created by the architect) and options (suggested by the domain-expert to fulfill information deficits in design model) together with so called variant-cards. The function of a variant-card is to recap and review all the essential info related to each design variant into a card.
