Shared conceptual model for the building envelope design process

The lack of communication and co-ordination among designers during the building envelope design process results in sub-optimal solutions leading to inadequate performance. To reverse this trend and to achieve better performance of the building envelope, professionals must be provided with computer integrated design tools which facilitate communication between participants and improve the transfer of data throughout the design process. This article presents a shared conceptual model that would enable integration in the building envelope design process. The wealth of data is organized into major envelope entities which are then decomposed into cohesive sets of data called primitives to form the conceptual model. Such a conceptual model should facilitate data exchange between design tasks, improve communications among designers and support the growth of data as the design process unfolds. The resulting conceptual model is implemented as a shared central database in an object-oriented database management system to experiment with integration. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.