Integrated Building Design Systems in Context of Product Data Technology

Abstract

Current issues in product data technology (PDT) concern integrated product and process modeling of industrial enterprises, the basic ingredients for arriving at Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM). The modeling process is driven by choices on the required granularity, which are, for example, dictated by the size of the CIM modules in the system architecture. These CIM developments emphasize equally the improving of the functionality and efficiency of certain enterprise tasks by new CIM modules and interfacing the CIM modules in an integrated framework. The main goal in the latter is to remove the data disorder that exists among the set of tools that a company puts to use for different functions in the process of designing, manufacturing, and shipping a product. These are the main goals of present PDT, which is predominantly data‐driven. It is thus that a coarse‐grain data view of the interacting modules drives the CIM approach. One of the consequences is that fine‐grained semantics remain “hidden” inside CIM modules as there is little or no need to “externalize” them for exchange with other CIM modules. It is tempting to regard the development of design tools in an integrated building design system as a standard PDT exercise. The nature of design tasks and their granularity is, however, such that this approach eventually fails. The European Community‐funded COMBINE project aims at providing the next generation of integrated building design systems by building on present PDT. In doing so, choices on granularity and levels of integration are a constant concern.