A pragmatic approach in supporting multi-disciplinary communication and negotiation in building design

Collaboration among discipline-specific design teams in the building design process is not only a common practice but also a vital aspect for the success of any non-trivial design. While many design task are now supported by, if not automated, by individually developed computer applications, conflicts in the world views, practices, and methods among disciplines have created islands of information. The current belief among researchers in this area is that shared resources must have a shared description to facilitate the information exchange between applications while allowing disciplines to maintain their own views on the same design artifact. In addition to a shared description, a communication infrastructure supporting collaboration among multiple disciplines not only must support literal exchanges of information but also must allow disciplines to maintain their internal belief system and data model that are vital for their respective design tasks and methodology. At the same time, the shared description cannot reflect a universal belief system and data model that is consistent and efficient for all the participating discipline-specific teams because it is simply not attainable with our current understandings of the design process, in particular, when human subjective judgement is involved. This thesis relies instead on a shared description that is minimally sufficient for design teams involved in a specific project in the sense that it captures just the information that has to be exchanged in this particular context. Although at first sight, it seems that straight translations/mappings among different data models/formats would suffice, research in this area is, in general, limited to translations of finished design products in a batch manner. For collaborations on design products that are still in the design process, a finer grain of mapping and communication method is needed. Recent research in the area of information exchange has, in general, left the mapping issue unaddressed and handles the process in an ad-hoc manner. The consequence is not only duplication of efforts spent on similar tasks, but also and most importantly, any slight modification to the shared model will result in full reviews and modifications of all the mapping modules. To address these issues, a series of experiments are conducted in several stages in conjunction with James Snyder's thesis work using the Object Modeling Language (OML) and the SPROUT language. The insights gained from these experiments are then formalized in a communication infrastructure called GLYL that includes a persistent data storage and a routing server, several test clients (all utilizing the GLYL software library, which is designed to be integrated into new clients and servers), and a formalized concept mapping mechanism using the SPROUT language as the data modeling language such that the infrastructure can be targeted toward different software and hardware platforms. This allows software developed by different disciplines to select software and hardware platforms deemed most suitable for their tasks.