DISTRIBUTED AEC DATABASES FOR COLLABORATIVE DESIGN

The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) design process fo r a facility involves participation of many design specialists. These participants are architects, engineers (structural, mechanical and ele ctrical) and contractors, who may be independent design professionals or design teams within an organization. From the viewpoint of informat ion processing, two characteristic features distinguish the AEC design process from many other design domains. Firstly, there is a massive v olume of design data involved in the design of each of its component s pecialties. Secondly, the specialization of the disciplines themselves warrant substantial autonomy. For design automation, this autonomy sh ould be realized without sacrificing the collaborative nature of the m ultidisciplinary AEC design process. We propose autonomous AEC databas es to deal with the first issue, and a global constraint maintenance m echanism for the second. Autonomous design databases can support the e xisting local applications in architectural, structural and mechanical engineering, and construction domains. However, a set of inter-discip linary constraints needs to be enforced to ensure spatial and function al consistency of the design. A global constraint checking mechanism f rees designers from the burden of keeping track of various design chan ges that may result in cross-functional conflicts. In this paper, we d iscuss the relevant issues for constraint management on distributed AE C databases. Although specific AEC examples will be used, the presenta tion is general enough to be applicable to other design domains, such as VLSI and manufacturing.