TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kraft, Bodo
A1  - Nagl, Manfred
T1  - Visual Knowledge Specification for Conceptual Design: Definition and Tool Support
N2  - In: Advanced Engineering Informatics. Vol 21, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 67-83 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2006.10.001 eds. J.C. Kunz, I.F.C. Smith and T. Tomiyama, Elsevier, Seite 1-22 Current CAD tools are not able to support the conceptual design phase, and none of them provides a consistency analysis for sketches produced by architects. This phase is fundamental and crucial for the whole design and construction process of a building. To give architects a better support, we developed a CAD tool for conceptual design and a knowledge specification tool. The knowledge is specific to one class of buildings and it can be reused. Based on a dynamic and domain-specific knowledge ontology, different types of design rules formalize this knowledge in a graph-based form. An expressive visual language provides a user-friendly, human readable representation. Finally, a consistency analysis tool enables conceptual designs to be checked against this formal conceptual knowledge. In this article, we concentrate on the knowledge specification part. For that, we introduce the concepts and usage of a novel visual language and describe its semantics. To demonstrate the usability of our approach, two graph-based visual tools for knowledge specification and conceptual design are explained.
KW  - CAD
KW  - CAD
KW  - Bauingenieurwesen
KW  - CAD
KW  - civil engineering
Y1  - 2007
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Kraft, Bodo
A1  - Nagl, Manfred
T1  - Semantic tool support for conceptual design
N2  - ITCE-2003 - 4th Joint Symposium on Information Technology in Civil Engineering ed Flood, I., Seite 1-12, ASCE (CD-ROM), Nashville, USA In this paper we discussed graph based tools to support architects during the conceptual design phase. Conceptual Design is defined before constructive design; the used concepts are more abstract. We develop two graph based approaches, a topdown using the graph rewriting system PROGRES and a more industrially oriented approach, where we extend the CAD system ArchiCAD. In both approaches, knowledge can be defined by a knowledge engineer, in the top-down approach in the domain model graph, in the bottom-up approach in the in an XML file. The defined knowledge is used to incrementally check the sketch and to inform the architect about violations of the defined knowledge. Our goal is to discover design error as soon as possible and to support the architect to design buildings with consideration of conceptual knowledge.
KW  - CAD
KW  - CAD
KW  - Bauingenieurwesen
KW  - CAD
KW  - civil engineering
Y1  - 2003
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Kraft, Bodo
A1  - Meyer, Oliver
A1  - Nagl, Manfred
T1  - Graph technology support for conceptual design in civil engineering
N2  - In: Advances in intelligent computing in engineering : proceedings of the 9.International EG-ICE Workshop ; Darmstadt, (01 - 03 August) 2002 / Martina Schnellenbach-Held ... (eds.) . - Düsseldorf: VDI-Verl., 2002 .- Fortschritt-Berichte VDI, Reihe 4, Bauingenieurwesen ; 180 ; S. 1-35 The paper describes a novel way to support conceptual design in civil engineering. The designer uses semantical tools guaranteeing certain internal structures of the design result but also the fulfillment of various constraints. Two different approaches and corresponding tools are discussed: (a) Visually specified tools with automatic code generation to determine a design structure as well as fixing various constraints a design has to obey. These tools are also valuable for design knowledge specialist. (b) Extensions of existing CAD tools to provide semantical knowledge to be used by an architect. It is sketched how these different tools can be combined in the future. The main part of the paper discusses the concepts and realization of two prototypes following the two above approaches. The paper especially discusses that specific graphs and the specification of their structure are useful for both tool realization projects.
KW  - CAD
KW  - CAD ;
KW  - CAD
KW  - civil engineering
Y1  - 2002
SN  - 3-18-318004-9
ER  -