Intelligent Objects for Synthesis of Structural Systems

Abstract

A building designer must synthesize a stuctural system with many interacting functionalities. The process is one of incremental, evolutionary design with noteworthy dynamics (concurrency) of interactions among different functionalities as the engineer develops the design. There exists no formal representation to describe the evolving object, but it is proposed that a suitable computer representation can be developed. The representation introduces data structures as locally intelligent objects describing substructures at different levels of abstraction. Those computational objects are developed as subclasses within an object‐oriented programming (OOP) environment, providing subsequent developers a template for their creation and use. The utility of such design objects requires an extension of conventional type checking, termed selective acceptance, and an extension of conventional message passing, termed delegation. Those constructs have been implemented and are described. An example of structural system synthesis is used, both to demonstrate the dynamics of that engineering process and to discuss the OOP application of design objects.