An information model for the preliminary design of buildings

Abstract: "The report outlines an information model that organizes the wealth of data used and generated during the conceptual design stage of buildings. The building is represented as an assembly of entities with relationships among them. Each entity represents a meaningful concept to design participants such as a beam, a room or a structural frame. Each entity contains data about its design aspect, its function aspect and its behavior aspect. Furthermore, each entity stores its geometry, its topological relationships with other entities, its containment relationships (made-of and part-of), a reference to the technology (knowledge and procedures) that is used to derive it, and a set of classifiers. The geometry and topological relationships for the entity are obtained from a non-manifold skeletal geometrical representation common across all views. Representation of multiple views is supported by dividing the attributes of an entity into small cohesive subsets, which we call components. These components are then used as construction blocks to present different views of the entity. The goal of this representation is twofold: to store the design data as it is generated during the conceptual design and to support case-based reasoning."