Diversity in Renovation Design: Theoretical Foundations of the Renovation Domain Model

Abstract

Sustainable building renovation design is a highly challenging and ever more pressing issue in the construction sector. Through rounds of dialogue and negotiation, architects along with diverse sets of stakeholders must iteratively search through a large number of potential designs while aiming to optimize a range of key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure, for example, construction cost, energy efficiency, an occupant’s sense of privacy, and so on. While software tools have significant potential for supporting this process, there is a lack of standardization within the community, creating barriers for the transfer of knowledge and tools between renovation projects. We are developing the Renovation Domain Model, NovaDM, a unifying framework that enables architects to formally represent project-specific details relevant to their renovation project so that NovaDM-compliant tools can be used for design generation and evaluation. In this paper we present the theoretical foundations of NovaDM, including action trees for defining project-specific scenario spaces, constraint languages for refining action trees, and a new aspect coverage strategy for structuring and sampling the full scenario space.