Alternatives in computer-aided design and visual analytics

设计和选择替代方案是专业工作的一个关键方面，现有的工具几乎无法提供支持。目前的趋势，参数化软件尖锐的需要明确表示的替代品，因为这些工具产生多种输出。该建议旨在表示，可视化和选择的参数系统中的替代品，适用于两个领域：计算机辅助建筑设计（CAD）和可视化分析（VA）。现存的替代方案的接口是由诸如版本控制、分支、历史、出处、撤销和画廊等思想构成的。所有这些在设计和分析中的某个时候都是有用的。没有人能完成所有的设计任务。该项目将备选方案的表示从与特定任务的绑定中抽象出来，而是通过集合、可视化、可配置的创建/编辑操作和同步编辑来构造备选方案。（3）集合可以通过多个关系（创建时间、编辑时间、输入相似性、输出相似性、设计者选择等）排序; (4)多个这样的集合可以同时可用;（5）用户决定如何生成、可视化和交互集合;（6）系统提供用于生成、可视化、选择和与集合交互的通用的、可重新配置的工具和策略;以及（7）系统提供用于同时编辑多个模型的能力。系统默认为支持已知任务的配置。用户可以重新配置系统以支持新任务。一个非常简单的例子是通过撤销来支持错误恢复，其中系统策略是将每个已编辑的状态添加到备选列表的末尾，并且接口是这样的状态序列，可以顺序遍历。一个更复杂的例子是探索，其中用户产生状态的小集合的变化，每个状态被安排为接近它是变化的状态。

Devising and choosing alternatives is a key aspect of professional work, for which available tools provide little support. The current trend to parametric software sharpens the need for explicit representation of alternatives as these tools produce multiple outputs. This proposal aims at representation, visualization and choice of alternatives in parametric systems, applied to two domains: computer-aided building design (CAD) and visual analytics (VA). The extant interfaces for alternatives are structured by ideas such as versioning, branching, history, provenance, undo and galleries. All of these are useful at some point in design and analysis. None fulfill all design tasks. This project abstracts the representation of alternatives away from being bound to specific tasks, instead structuring alternatives by collections, visualizations, configurable creation/editing operations, and simultaneous editing.The research premises are that (1) alternatives are model states; (2) collections of alternatives are first class objects; (3) collections may be ordered by multiple relationships (creation time, edit time, input similarity, output similarity, designer choice,...); (4) multiple such collections can be simultaneously available; (5) users decide how collections are generated, visualized and interact; (6) the system provides general, reconfigurable tools and policies for generating, visualizing, selecting and interacting with collections; and (7) the system provides capabilities for simultaneous editing of multiple models. The system defaults to configurations supporting known tasks. The user can reconfigure the system to support new tasks. A very simple example is supporting error recovery through undo, in which the system policy is to add each edited state at the end of an alternative list and the interface is to a sequence of such states, which can be sequentially traversed. A more complex example is exploration, in which a user produces variations of a small collection of states, each of which is arranged so as to stay close to the state from which it is a variation.