Presidential Young Investigator Award: Knowledge Representation for Structural Design

这位总统青年调查员的研究涉及创造新一代初步设计环境。这个新的环境将把建筑和结构工程结合起来，这样结构工程的概念和考虑就可以被引入到建筑物的初步设计中。本研究的重点是知识和设计表征。知识将以计算机和人类工程师都能接受的通用表示形式呈现。为了展示设计知识库的强大功能，将开发一个原型CAD系统。该系统的一个主要目标是促进人类设计决策，这将是全面设计自动化系统的基础。在将基本设计技能纳入系统后，将添加智能功能，例如为部分设计问题提供建议或解决方案。要实现后一项目标，需要将更高层次的知识整合到知识库中。

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.