Hybrid Environment for Standards Processing

Abstract

The terms code of practice and standard are used interchangeably throughout the profession and refer to the same documents, namely, those which prescribe a set of regulatory, mandatory, or obligatory rules to which every design must comply. Every structure must therefore be designed in accordance with, and checked for conformance against, the relevant standard or code. This procedure is known as standards processing. This paper presents an environment for standards processing called SADA, an acronym for Standards Automated Design Assistant. SADA consists of four main components, the Code Information Base, the Processing Module, the Dependency Network Generator, and the Design Case Base, and adopts a hybrid approach incorporating hypertext, case-based reasoning and object-oriented technologies. One of the main objectives of SADA is to address the drawbacks commonly associated with standards. Each of the main drawbacks are identified and discussed within the introduction, which is followed by an overview of the SADA environment. A detailed description of each of the main components is provided in subsequent sections.