Visualisation—A Conceptual Design Aid

Due to highly fragmented nature of the of Architecture Engineering Construction (AEC) industry and time constraints, little attention has been devoted to the conceptual design process. Multidisciplinary teams start with a limited set of requirements, mostly imposed by the Architect, to work on only a restricted number of design alternatives. Therefore, final designs often lack satisfactory performance throughout its life. This paper uses a decision support tool, the IVCG, which combines the searching power of evolutionary computation with the exploration power of an interactive visualisation tools to assist designers at the conceptual design stage. This approach facilitates members of the different disciplines involved to interact with the system independently to identify those regions of the search space which best satisfy the requirements of their individual disciplines. It then allows them to agree on a `mutually inclusive' region that partially satisfies the needs of all parties involved in the design. The system also uses the Pareto optimisation algorithm to focus on a limited number of solutions, inside the Pareto front, for the multi-disciplinary team to interactively explore solutions within this region. This enables selection of a workable number of `compromised solutions' that are acceptable to all parties involved.