Interactive Visualisation Systems for Conceptual Building Design: A Practical Approach: Fid-Bau Portal

Interactive Visualisation Systems for Conceptual Building Design: A Practical Approach

Rafiq, M. Y. / Beck, M. / Packham, I.

Abstract At the conceptual stage of the design process where only a partial specification for a design is available and due to fuzzy nature of information at this stage it is difficult to program every design requirements. Experience has shown that evolutionary computation EC, (particularly the genetic algorithm) to be an effective decision support tool for conceptual design. To make EC useful in this stage of the design it needs strong human interaction and guidance to lead the search in discrete regions of the search space to explore and discover more appropriate design concepts. Humans are extremely good at perceptual evaluation of designs according to criteria that are extremely hard to program (Eckert et al., 1999). As a result, they can provide useful fitness evaluation for interactive evolutionary systems. They can also include personal preferences to lead the search and exploration to a preferred direction. This kind of interaction is extremely important to satisfy design/client requirements, particularly at the conceptual stage of the design process. This paper introduces a novel approach which demonstrates that interactive use of evolutionary computation, assisted by visualisation tools, leads to a human-led search. A system which support human-led search and it is based on an interactive visualisation clustered genetic algorithm, developed by Packham and coworkers (Packham, 2003; Packham and Denham, 2003; Packham et al., 2004; Rafiq et al., 2004), is introduced and its application on an example of a multi-disciplinary decision making process is demonstrated.