Exploring the Application of Optimization Technology in AEC

AECbytes starts off this month with a new Viewpoint article entitled "Digital Transformation of the AEC Industry: An Innovation Perspective." Co-authored by a team of academics including Youngjin Yoo of Temple University and Richard J. Boland and Kalle Lyytinen of Case Western Reserve University, this article describes their NSF sponsored research on several major projects by Frank Gehry in which his firm used CATIA to model the complex geometry of their buildings and how that has influenced the way he works with owners, contractors, subcontractors, engineers and fabricators. It also includes a call for AEC firms to participate in their follow-up study, which is also being funded by the NSF, to track the broader set of information technologies that are increasingly used in AEC projects and to identify their consequences.

This is followed by the monthly Tips and Tricks series, which features useful tips on three different applications: a 3ds Max tutorial showing an extremely convenient and easy to use 3D shading effect that appears at render time; a SketchUp tutorial showing how to use images with alpha transparency as Components and fix their shadow problems; and an ArchiCAD tutorial showing the versatile uses to which the new Virtual Trace feature can be put.

In going with the “looking ahead” theme of the AECbytes Building the Future series, this month’s issue takes a look at the application of a sophisticated computational technology to a specific aspect of AEC: the design and development of a building site. The technology is called evolutionary computing, and it is a subset of the field of artificial intelligence that involves combinatorial optimization problems, where optimization is the process of finding the most effective solutions to a problem given a set of constraints. The application that has been developed to apply this technology to the field of site design and land development is called SITEOPS. It gives land planners and civil engineers the ability to explore several options, under a user-defined set of parameters, within hours instead of weeks or months. The application delivers multiple site designs, providing the optimal layout, grading and storm water drainage options with accurate cost estimates. In the process of exploring SITEOPS, we can also think about how the optimization technology that it uses could potentially be applied to other design problems in AEC.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > March 2008