Presidential Young Investigator Award: Knowledge Representation for Structural Design

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The research of this Presidential Young Investigator involves the creation of a new generation of preliminary design environments. This new environment will integrate architectural and structural engineering so that the concepts and considerations of a structural engineering can be introduced into the preliminary design of a building. The emphasis of this research is knowledge and design representation. Knowledge will be presented with a generalized representation accepted by both the computer and human engineer. To demonstrate the power of the design knowledge base, a prototype CAD system will be developed. A primary goal of the system is to facilitate human design decision making, which will be the foundation of full-scale design automation systems. After the basic design skills have been incorporated into the system, intelligent features, such as providing advice or solutions to parts of the design problem, will be added. Achieving this latter goal requires that higher level knowledge be integrated into the knowledge base.