The International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction
Publications / 1987 Proceedings of the 4th ISARC, Haifa, Israel
A Predictive Model of the Building Design Process
In a complex construction industry, such as that in the UK, the building process is predominantly that of assembling components made off-site. This requires that all the components are detailed, together with the methods of fixing, sufficiently early to ensure that the components are delivered to site at the right time. The effect of this has been to increase the number of drawings produced by the design team, for a typical project to between 500 and 5000. Frequently this process fails because its complexity is not understood nor managed sensibly. The research described in the paper attempts to evaluate the hypothesis that: implicit within the technology of the project is a design task and that the tasks are linked together to give an interrelated network of the design process. An AI approach is being adopted in several ways to examine the problem. It is being used in the search for patterns of data flow to create the network and thus evaluate the hypothesis and also to build a network model of the design process. The final model will be linked to the construction activity model TIME, also written in Prolog 2, to form a model of the complete construction procurement task.