A KNOWLEDGE-BASED APPROACH TO PRELIMINARY DESIGN OF BUILDINGS

Preliminary design is an early stage in the design process during whic h a number of different structural schemes are formulated and accessed . This Paper describes the approach adopted in DOLMEN, a prototype kno wledge-based system for preliminary structural design. This system pro duces realistic designs in structural steel and reinforced concrete fo r regularly shaped buildings, and assists in the evaluation of these d esigns. It allows a large number of configurations to be considered an d performs optimization in accordance with user set goals. The princip les, methodology and implementation of the system are described. A rea l design problem is given and the results from DOLMEN are compared wit h those from a manual design.