This paper provides a survey on recent research in the area of design rationale. The study of design rationale spans a number of diverse disciplines, touching on concepts from research communities in mechanical design, software engineering, artificial intelligence, civil engineering, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-factors and human-computer interaction research. We focus this survey on prototype design rationale systems for these application domains, and put forward several major criteria with which to describe and classify design rationale systems, including argumentation-based, descriptive, process-based approaches. Further, we attempt to abstract the place of systems and tools for design rationale capture and retrieval in the context of contemporary knowledge-based engineering and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools. This survey is structured around classes of fundamentally different approaches, their representation schema, their capture methods and retrieval techniques. A number of recent design rationale systems, including JANUS, COMET, ADD. REMAP, HOS, PHIDIAS, DRIVE and IBIS are analysed. We conclude with an assessment of current state-of-the-art and a discussion of critical open research issues.

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A Survey of Design Rationale Systems: Approaches, Representation, Capture and Retrieval

The realization that concurrent engineering can be adopted in construction has led to various efforts to develop appropriate tools and techniques for its implementation in the industry. This paper discusses the role of client requirements processing in implementing concurrent engineering in construction. Client requirements processing refers to the definition, analysis, and translation of client requirements into solution‐neutral specifications for design. It is essential in maintaining focus on the client, and provides for the effective consideration, resolution and prioritization of the various perspectives within the client body. It also facilitates collaborative teamwork, compliance checking at every stage of the design and construction process, and the traceability of design decisions to explicit and implicit client requirements. The paper concludes with a description of a model for processing clients' requirements in construction, and an example of its practical application.

Establishing and processing client requirements—a key aspect of concurrent engineering in construction

Rationale Management in Software Engineering: Concepts and Techniques

Modelling detailed information flows in building design with the parameter-based design structure matrix

Detailed design of building projects is a complex multidisciplinary process highly dependent upon effective aggregation of individual designs to produce a coherent set of final design documents. Throughout the detailed design process, changes are frequently introduced and need to be properly managed among the various members of the design team. This paper presents an information model for storing design information, recording design rationale, and managing design changes. The proposed model is built around a central library of generalized building components that can be used to describe a complete building project hierarchy. Each component allows the designer to store desired performance criteria and related design rationale. Each component is also sensitive to its own changes and automatically communicates such changes to affected parties through preset communication paths. The model, as such, provides improved design coordination and control over changes, thus helping to increase the consistency and productivity of the overall design process. Conceptual details of the model are described in this paper, and model implementation into a collaborative design system is presented in a companion paper.

Improving Design Coordination for Building Projects. I: Information Model

Producing constructed facilities of the highest quality in a cost-effective envi- ronment will benefit not only owners and end users, but also all participants engaged in the conception, design, construction, operation, maintenance, rehabilitation, or decommission phase of its life cycle. Cost-effective and top-quality facilities can be conceived, designed, built, and operated if these activities are not performed in a vacuum, but rather, performed in a life-cycle context. Concurrent engineering is a philosophy, which is conducive to true life-cycle analysis. It brings together, from project inception, multiple individuals to address all angles of a project and enables the accumulation of knowledge and information so as to reduce downstream risks and anticipate constructability, operability, and maintainability expectations. Aspects of concurrent engineering are already practiced in the architecture/ engineering-construction (A/E/C) industry in the form of Total Quality Management (TQM), constructability reviews, and partnering. Other aspects like multifunctional team formation, macrolevel reorganization, and computer-based cooperative and distributed design still have not been adopted. This paper suggests that the A/E/C industry should continue adopting more facets of the concurrent engineering paradigm. Concurrent engineering can turn the industry's high degree of fragmentation and specialization into a strength, as opposed to a current debility.

Value of Concurrent Engineering for A/E/C Industry

Building designers typically develop a set of drawings and specifications that graphically and textually depict the building. These documents contain implicit information about the rationale or reasoning leading to the final form of the design. Access to design rationale information avoids the need to speculate about or request for the implicit information stored in the design drawings and specifications. The main focus of this article is on the use of a parameter dependency network to represent design rationale. This paper details one possible data structure capable of generating a parameter dependency network. The parameter dependency network shows how one particular design decision affects other decisions that further affect other decisions. The structured nature of this network allows a computer program to act as a data verification assistant to the human designer. This article also outlines a classification scheme for design rationale systems. Finally, this paper summarizes the contributions of this research and concludes with descriptions of possible future research work.

Using Parameter Dependency Network to Represent Design Rationale

Data Structures Supporting Design Rationale Capture

The increasing complexity of building facilities highlights the need for improved communication among the numerous Architecture-Engineering-Construction (AEC) participants involved in a single project. The AEC industry implements value engineering programs not only to improve the life cycle cost effectiveness of these projects, but also to improve the communication of design intent among the project participants. This paper briefly describes the design intent and value engineering concepts from the point of view of the AEC industry. Emerging computer technologies such as computer-aided design and artificial intelligence are necessary in the implementation of the coupling of these two concepts. This coupling improves the efficiency of the value engineering process. The paper also presents a prototype computer-aided value engineering (CAVE) system currently under development. The implementation of a CAVE system embeds the value engineering process in the design process and forms the foundation for a computer-integrated facility life cycle concept

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Primo T. Alcantara

Papers

Value of Concurrent Engineering for A/E/C Industry

Using Parameter Dependency Network to Represent Design Rationale

Data Structures Supporting Design Rationale Capture

Applications Of Design Intent In ValueEngineering