Case-based Design Using Weakly Structured Information

SUBMITTED: August 2001
REVISED: June 2002
PUBLISHED: July 2002
EDITOR: B-C. Björk

Peter Johansson, Assistant Professor,
Department of Structural Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
email: peter.johansson@ste.chalmers.se


Mina Popova, Ph.D. Candidate
Dept. of Visualization and Modelling, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
email: mina@arch.chalmers.se

SUMMARY:Over 50% of the work done by the designer on a day-to-day basis is routine design that consists of reusing past design solutions (Moore, 1993). Despite of this fact, there are no tools that rationally support reuse of such solutions. Case-based design (CBD) has been pointed out as a promising aid to help this situation. In order to be of practical use, however, a case-based design system has to be able to use the information that the designer creates during the design process. The design information that the designer creates is today mostly in the form of weakly structured information, e.g. text documents, calculation documents, and 2D-drawings. This paper proposes an approach that enables capturing and representation of weakly structured information for the purpose of case-based structural design. The representation proposed allows us to apply most of the objectoriented abstract principles also on weakly structured information. It is also shown how the conceptual framework, the dependency structure, and the design process can be captured, represented, and used in CBD. The approach is successfully implemented into a prototype for reuse of computerized design calculation documents.

KEYWORDS: case-based reasoning, design, structural design, representation, object orientation, weakly structured information

FULL TEXT: paper in PDF format (409071 bytes)

CITATION:

Johansson P, and Popova M (2002) Case-based Design Using Weakly Structured Information, ITcon Vol. 7, pg. 27-44, http://www.itcon.org/2002/2