Decentralized E/E architectures (EEAs) are facing challenges and bottlenecks in implementing new features and technologies. The shift towards centralized EEAs has many challenges and needs to be handled pragmatically by considering concurrency with the existing EEAs. To address the challenges of architectural shift, the paper showcases the quantitative comparison of EEAs and visualizes the flow of shifting sub-function and hardware blocks using the Sankey diagram. The observations from the diagram as a result will support OEMs to analyse and take decisions on the shift while developing EEAs.

The use of local natural and recycled feedstock is promising for sustainable construction. However, unlike versatile engineered bricks, natural and recycled feedstock involves design challenges due to their stochastic, sequential, and heterogeneous nature. For example, the practical use of stone masonry is limited, as it still relies on human experts with holistic domain knowledge to determine the sequential organization of natural stones with different sizes/shapes. Reinforcement learning (RL) is expected to address such design challenges, as it allows artificial intelligence (AI) agents to autonomously learn design policy, that is, identifying the best design decision at each time step. As a proof-of-concept RL framework for design automation involving heterogeneous feedstock, a stone masonry design framework is presented. The proposed framework is founded upon a virtual design environment, MasonTris, inspired by the analogy between stone masonry and Tetris. MasonTris provides a Tetris-like virtual environment combined with a finite element analysis (FEA), where AI agents learn effective design policies without human intervention. Also, a new data collection policy, almost-greedy policy, is designed to address the sparsity of feasible designs for faster/stable learning. As computation bottleneck occurs when parallel agents evaluate designs with different complexities, a modification of the RL framework is proposed that FEA is held until training data are retrieved for training. The feasibility and adaptability of the proposed framework are demonstrated by continuously improving stone masonry design policy in simplified design problems. The framework can be generalizable to different natural and recycled feedstock by incorporating more realistic assumptions, opening opportunities in design automation for sustainability.

Designing accessible and inclusive buildings is essential if they are to provide enjoyable and inspiring experiences for all their occupants. Research revealed that many architectural design professionals perceive a lack of awareness of the aspects to consider when designing to be a limiting factor in the uptake of Inclusive Design. By involving expert stakeholders this study provides evidence for the demand to create an Inclusive Design Canvas, a strategic design template offering an educational springboard for building industry professionals to embed Inclusive Design in the design process.

This exploratory work aims to understand which elements of a building mostly attract visitors’ attention. An experiment was conducted to allow participants to visit a prototype tiny house while wearing eye-tracking glasses. Identified gazed elements of the prototype were selected and the corresponding dwell times used as variables. The limited dwell times on structural elements show that they can be easily overshadowed by other features present in the building. This leads to a design problem when the novelty and the quality of a new product, markedly a building, reside in the materials used.

Adaptive façades (AF), unlike conventional façades, respond to their environment to reduce energy consumption while increasing comfort. The planning of AF presents architects and engineers with a variety of challenges. One central challenge is the specification of the right planning goals in the early phases. This paper identifies in a systematic literature review the main characteristics which were crucial in previous realizations of AF. Due to the comprehensive approach it provides a reference for the goal definition of subsequent projects and the development of further methodical support.

Design process modelling is well-founded in fields of mechanical engineering, and product design and development but not in Building Design (BD). This paper looks at the selection process when choosing appropriate models for specific BD processes. The paper adapts process model selection criteria from Trauer's work and combines it with anecdotal evidence from the authors to select these models. The selection criteria were ranked, categorised, and applied to BD processes explained. Process models related to each selection criteria were then selected from backward snowballing of literature.

This paper presents a preliminary study into the spatial features that can be used to distinguish creativity andefficiency in design layouts, and the distinct pattern of cognitive and metacognitive activity that is associated with creative design. In a design experiment, a group of 12 architects were handed a design brief. Their drawing activity was recorded and they were required to externalize their thoughts during the design process. Both design solutions and verbal comments were analysed and modelled. A separate group of experienced architects used their expert knowledge to assign creativity and efficiency scores to the 12 design solutions. The design solutions were evaluated spatially. Protocol analysis studies including linkography and macroscopic analysis were used to discern distinctive patterns in the cognitive and metacognition activity of designs marked with the highest and least creativity scores. Entropy models of the linkographs and knowledge graphs were further introduced Finally, we assessed how creativity and efficiency correlates to experiment variables, cognitive activity, metacognitive activity, spatial and functional distribution of spaces in the design solutions, and the number and type of design constraints applied through the course of design. Through this investigation, we suggest that expert knowledge can be used to assess creativity and efficiency in designs. Our findings indicate that efficient layouts have distinct spatial features, and that cognitive and metacognitive activity in design that yields a highly creative outcome corresponds to higher frequencies of design moves and higher linkages between design moves.

The term “creative space” describes a relatively recent phenomenon of innovative workplace design. Such creative workspaces are becoming popular in industry and academia. However, the impact of specific spatial design decisions on creativity and innovation is not yet fully understood. This paper provides an overview of state-of-the-art research on creative work and learning environments. We conducted a systematic literature search within the Scopus database and identified a total of 73 relevant sources discussing creative spaces within academic, practice, and other innovation environments. Among the included sources are 51 academic publications and 22 sources from company research and illustrative coffee-table books. We analyzed the sources using three lenses of interest: (1) the types of theoretical and practical contributions that are provided, (2) the spatial characteristics that are suggested to be beneficial for creativity and innovation, and (3) the discussed potential of new technologies for designing or researching creative spaces. The results provide in-depth insight into the current state of research on the topic of creative spaces. Practitioners, educators, and researchers can use the presented overview to investigate the possible impact of creative workspace design and identify research gaps that can be filled by conducting further research in the field.

As the complexity of the systems increases, so does the complexity of designing a suitable engineering IT architecture. Challenges reach from the definition of required and consistent functionalities and interfaces to the evaluation, which combination of IT tools fulfils the required functionality, usability and interoperability in the best way. Thus, we provide a procedure, methodology and modelling support for the definition of functional and logical engineering IT architectures and their holistic evaluation. The approach is part of an overall procedure and demonstrated in an example.

Function and constraints modelling are implemented to design two gridded ion thrusters for additive manufacturing (AM). One concept takes advantage of AM design freedom, disregarding AM limitations and is not feasible. The other concept considers AM limitations and is manufacturable and feasible. Constraints modelling highlights AM capabilities that can be improved, showing where future investment is needed. Constraints representation can also support the creation of technology development roadmaps able to identify areas of AM technologies that must be improved.

An important task in the initial stages of most architectural design processes is the design of planar floor plans, that are composed of non-overlapping rooms divided from each other by walls while satisfying given topological and dimensional constraints. The work described in this paper is part of a larger research aimed at developing the mathematical theory for examining the feasibility of given topological constraints and providing a generic floor plan solution for all possible design briefs.

In this paper, we mathematically describe universal (or generic) rectangular floor plans with n rooms, that is, the floor plans that topologically contain all possible rectangular floor plans with n rooms. Then, we present a graph-theoretical approach for enumerating generic rectangular floor plans upto nine rooms. At the end, we demonstrate the transformation of generic floor plans into a floor plan corresponding to a given graph.

This study deals with the role of mental models in the coordination of team activities during design problem-solving. The work centers on the sharedness of mental models in a design team setting, mainly on the interaction between an architect and two clients. A major goal is to gain insight into how modifications in mental models affect coordination, and how sharedness develops through the process. Our focus is to explore, through a case study, the individual contributions of the architect and the clients to coordination of the work process, and how sharedness of the development of the team mental model evolves in the early stage of concept generation. Our claim is that work teams develop a certain degree of sharedness of the mental models of individual team members during information exchange. This team mental model can be insufficient or even wrong, but as long as the team members feel agreement in the team, they coordinate their work on that basis. Thus, sharedness of mental models is believed to be a powerful team asset, especially when it is reached in the earlier phases of the design process. Our findings suggest that in order to attain sharedness among design team members, design activities related to the task mental model should be encouraged, specifically the generation of new ideas and the analysis of solutions. Implications for practice and education are suggested.

Shape grammars are rule-based formalisms for the specification of shape languages. Most of the existing shape grammars are developed on paper and have not been implemented computationally thus far. Nevertheless, the computer implementation of shape grammar is an important research question, not only to automate design analysis and generation, but also to extend the impact of shape grammars toward design practice and computer-aided design tools. In this paper, we investigate the implementation of shape grammars on a computer system, using a graph-theoretic representation. In particular, we describe and evaluate the implementation of the existing Rabo-de-Bacalhau transformation grammar. A practical step-by-step approach is presented, together with a discussion of important findings noticed during the implementation and evaluation. The proposed approach is shown to be both feasible and valuable in several aspects: we show how the attempt to implement a grammar on a computer system leads to a deeper understanding of that grammar, and might result in the further development of the grammar; we show how the proposed approach is embedded within a commercial computer-aided design environment to make the shape grammar formalism more accessible to students and practitioners, thereby increasing the impact of grammars on design practice; and the proposed step-by-step implementation approach has shown to be feasible for the implementation of the Rabo-de-Bacalhau transformation grammar, but can also be generalized using different ontologies for the implementation.

The concept of shape grammars has often been proposed to improve or support creative design processes. Shape grammar implementations have the potential to both automate parts of the design process and allow exploration of design alternatives. In many of the existing implementations, the main focus is either on capturing the rationale of a particular existing grammar or on allowing designers to develop a new grammar. However, little attention is typically given to the actual representation of the design space that can be explored in the interface of the implementation. With such representation, a shape grammar implementation could properly support designers who are still in the process of designing and may not yet have a clear shape grammar in mind. In this article, an approach and a proof-of-concept software system is proposed for a shape grammar implementation that provides a visual and interactive way to support design space exploration in a creative design process. We describe the method by which this software system can be used and focus on how designers can interact with the exploration process. In particular, we point out how the proposed approach realizes several important amplification strategies to support design space exploration.

This paper presents the development of an optimization methodology for selecting the lowest monetary cost combinations of building technologies to meet set operational energy reduction targets. The new optimization algorithm introduced in this paper departs from the notion that optimal design choices over a large set of design parameters and properties can be driven by energy targets. We assume that design parameters are determined by many concurrent considerations fighting over the attention span of the design team. Our approach starts from a design outcome and asks the question, which set of discrete technologies are the right mix to reach an energy target in the cost optimal way? Such an approach has to face the challenge that the properties of market-available building technologies have a discrete nature that makes their optimal selection a combinatorial problem. The optimization algorithm searches the discrete combinatoric space by maximizing the following objective function: calculated energy savings divided by premium cost, where cost is defined as the additional cost over a baseline solution. The algorithm is codified into a custom MATLAB script and when compared to prescriptive methodologies is shown to be more cost effective and generically applicable given a palette of building technology alternatives and their corresponding cost data.

Three-dimensional (3-D) geometry can be described in many ways, with both a varying syntax and a varying semantics. As a result, several very diverse schemas and file formats can be deployed to describe geometry, depending on the application domain in question. In a multidisciplinary domain such as the domain of architecture, engineering, and construction, this range of specialized schemas makes file format conversions inevitable. The approach adopted by current conversion tools, however, often results in a loss of information, most often due to a “mistranslation” between different syntaxes and/or semantics, leading to errors and limitations in the design conception stage and to inefficiency due to the required remodeling efforts. An approach based on semantic web technology may reduce the loss of information significantly, leading to an improved processing of 3-D information and hence to an improved design practice in the architecture, engineering, and construction domain. This paper documents our investigation of the nature of this 3-D information conversion problem and how it may be encompassed using semantic web technology. In an exploratory double test case, we show how the specific deployment of semantic rule languages and an appropriate inference engine are to be adopted to improve this 3-D information exchange. It shows how semantic web technology allows the coexistence of diverse descriptions of the same 3-D information, interlinked through explicit conversion rules. Although only a simple example is used to document the process, and a more in-depth investigation is needed, the initial results indicate the suggested approach to be a useful alternative approach to obtain an improved 3-D information exchange.

This paper examines the role of design concepts in a modus operandi as opposed to a modus operatum, which is how their generation, as it unfolds over time, is perceived by someone involved in designing instead of with the hindsight of being finished. To this end, the interactive activation and competition model, commonly used to model the retrieval of information from stored knowledge of individual exemplars, is applied in the context of architectural design. Parsing the data of an architect's think-aloud protocol through this model at successive points in the design process results in a photo shoot of a design concept “under construction.” This allows for the start of appreciating and accounting for the highly elusive character of concepts during design.

This paper investigates the use of typological knowledge in the visual modality through a computer framework that combines multidisciplinary technologies from computer science, that is, artificial intelligence, software engineering, database system, and programming language, to help provide solutions and services to building designers. The solving of design problems frequently involves visual thinking, which has to do with the intensive use of visual knowledge like pictures, images, and other types of visual displays. The recognized power of typological knowledge in design problem solving is applied to support the exploration of a diversity of possible design solutions represented in a pictorial mode. The innovative use of computer science technologies enables a smooth link of visual typological knowledge with the design goals. Within the framework, a core technology was designed to respond to a designer's specific needs through dynamic user viewpoint generation, so that design solutions are associated with relevant (retrieved) visual typologies from the knowledge base. This has been achieved in a two-way process, in which the designer establishes an interactive dialogue with an experimental computerized framework.