Bianca Toth

Energy-Oriented Design Tools for Collaboration in the Cloud

Emerging from the challenge to reduce energy consumption in buildings is the need for energy simulation to be used more effectively to support integrated decision making in early design. As a critical response to a Green Star case study, we present DEEPA, a parametric modeling framework that enables architects and engineers to work at the same semantic level to generate shared models for energy simulation. A cloud-based toolkit provides web and data services for parametric design software that automate the process of simulating and tracking design alternatives, by linking building geometry more directly to analysis inputs. Data, semantics, models and simulation results can be shared on the fly. This allows the complex relationships between architecture, building services and energy consumption to be explored in an integrated manner, and decisions to be made collaboratively.

Custom Digital Workflows: A New Framework for Design Analysis Integration

Flexible information exchange is critical to successful design-analysis integration, but current top-down, standards-based and model-oriented strategies impose restrictions that contradict this flexibility. In this article we present a bottom-up, user-controlled and process-oriented approach to linking design and analysis applications that is more responsive to the varied needs of designers and design teams. Drawing on research into scientific workflows, we present a framework for integration that capitalises on advances in cloud computing to connect discrete tools via flexible and distributed process networks. We then discuss how a shared mapping process that is flexible and user friendly supports non-programmers in creating these custom connections. Adopting a services-oriented system architecture, we propose a web-based platform that enables data, semantics and models to be shared on the fly. We then discuss potential challenges and opportunities for its development as a flexible, visual, collaborative, scalable and open system.

Custom Digital Workflows with User-Defined Data Transformations Via Property Graphs

Custom digital workflows aim to allow diverse, non-integrated design and analysis applications to be custom linked in digital workflows, created by a variety of users, including those who are not expert programmers. With the intention of introducing this in practice, education and research, this paper focuses on critical aspects of overcoming interoperability hurdles, illustrating the use of property graphs for mapping data between AEC software tools that are not connected by common data formats and/or other interoperability measures. A brief exemplar design scenario is presented to illustrate the concepts and methods proposed, and conclusions are then drawn regarding the feasibility of this approach and directions for further research.