Providing Formal Support for Standards Usage Within SEED

Abstract

Within a building design system, such as the SEED system, applicable building codes and standards must be addressed so as to ensure that the synthesized building solution complies with these standards. Because there are many design standards, specifications, and codes of accepted practice that govern the design of any building type, a formal treatment of these documents is a necessary component of such a design system. To support the standards processing needs of the SEED system, we are developing the Standards Support Environment (SSE) for processing formally represented building standards during the stages of design supported in SEED. The SSE will be composed of two major components: The Standards Processing Framework (SPF), which represents standards processing servers as distributed agents behaving as black box abstractions that communicate via a protocal and provide functionalities for processing language requests for defining, using and reviewing the models of standards; and the Standards Usage Module (SUM), which acts as an interface between the SPF and SEED and manages the various uses of standards made by the SEED modules.