Assisting conceptual design of building structures by an interactive description logic based planner

Designing structural configurations for today's building structures is a challenging engineering activity that needs to be supported. Existing systems often cannot support the engineer in designing a structural configuration with a robust global load transfer. In this paper, we discuss an interactive planning algorithm that assists the engineer in the conceptual design task by knowledge about structure. Central to our approach is the use of adapted inference services of a description logic reasoner that controls the global load transfer of the structural configuration under development and the design process on their evaluation results. We introduce the expressive description logic language SHIQD(-) to represent structural knowledge acquired from practitioners. A hierarchical planning language on top of it used for representing the dynamic design process. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.