Agents to Foster Conscious Design and Reuse in Architecture

Abstract

In architecture companies, work is very often performed by several individuals. From conceptual design to the construction of a final product, the object passes through many hands, each one adding bits and pieces until it is completed. Often, though, these different groups of people who work on a design don’t interact much, which generates problems at later phases. There is little reuse of materials and time may be wasted in exceedingly complex designs. The processes and problems exhibited by the company studied are quite common and can easily be found in other companies. We present an agent framework to improve process awareness in an architecture company. Based on user activities and previous designs, agents identify possibilities for reuse and provide information to the conceptual designer so that their designs take construction difficulties and possibilities for reuse into account. The agents instrument the process to produce global awareness, so that the designers design to facilitate later steps and optimize the process as a whole. In this paper we present the agent architecture, as well as each agent’s general functioning and reasoning rules.