Ian Packham

IMPORTANCE OF VISUALIZATION IN DECISION MAKING PROCESS IN ENGINEERING DESIGN #8539

Currently engineering design information is poorly presented. There is an urgent need for systems that allow proper visualisation of the information in an understandable manner which assists members of the multi-disciplinary team to comprehend the overall knowledge of the multi-disciplinary design issues. The need for such systems is particularly important at the conceptual stage of the design process where more important decisions about the future of the projects are being taken at a very short time span . The research presented in this paper has tried to take initial steps in this direction by developing an interactive v isualisation system that assists designers by using various visualisation tools and techniques to develop a deeper understanding of the search and solution spaces and supports them in evaluating the merits of alternative desig n solutions within a multi disciplinary environment.

Development of a Catchment Management Tool to Assess Environmental Risk from Nutrient Loadings Using Open Source GIS

A Catchment Management Tool (CMT) is being developed for the Irish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that will allow River Basin Managers to evaluate the environmental risk from organic and inorganic nutrient loadings due to various land uses and human activities. The CMT was built using Open Source GIS (Geographical Information System) software, to facilitate development and widen the research user-base of the tool. The user interface of the CMT is designed to be flexible to allow local knowledge to be included in the system as well as the possibility to try what-if scenarios in relation to environmental assessment. Contaminant loadings are calculated from publicly available data and hydrogeologically susceptible areas (HSAs) are formed by combining soil and geological GIS layers. Further combinations of Loadings and HSAs allow Critical Source Areas to be delineated that identify areas contributing significant amounts of a given contaminant to any selected water body.

INTERACTIVE VISUALISATION SYSTEMS FOR CONCEPTUAL BUILDING DESIGN: A PRACTICAL APPROACH

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.