A generalised framework for the design and construction of integrated design systems

Abstract

The building industry employs a significant percentage of the workforce of any country, and encompasses a considerable proportion of a country's GDP. Despite that, IT tools used in the design and management of a building project are still fairly crude. Many projects have been undertaken to develop IT-based solutions to support the architecture, engineering, and construction domains (A/E/C), but little effort has gone into the tools required to support these development activities. This is the area in which this thesis concentrates. To develop a schema representing some subsystem of a building it is necessary to have support tools which enhance the modeller's environment. The current state of the art, a replicated paper based approach, is ineffective at guaranteeing the consistency and validity of large schemas. In this thesis, a more appropriate environment is developed and demonstrated. This provides multiple overlapping views of the developing schema, with guaranteed consistency between all views, the ability for many modellers to work on the schema, and links to related aspects. The array of schemas being developed for the A/E/C domains contain overlaps of information, though often in different representations. To enable the full use and correct transfer of information between schemas, mappings between their representations need to be defined. This thesis develops a comprehensive mapping language which describes bidirectional mappings between schemas. An automated system has been constructed which can take a mapping specification and manage the updates and consistency of data in models corresponding to the mapped schemas. To manage the development of environments described above, as well as the finished integrated environments proposed, it is necessary to manage and control the supported processes. A notation is developed to allow this control to be defined, and an implementation is provided to demonstrate how a project can be managed. The end result of the thesis is a set of notations and associated tools which support all aspects of the development and implementation of integrated design environments. The resultant development environment greatly raises the level of support for developers over that offered by current tools, for all aspects of specification, consistency, testing, validation, implementation, and coordination between developers.