TR017: Linking Knowledge-Based Systems to CAD Design Data with an Object-Oriented Building Product Model

Sharing of product data among discipline specialists and across stages in the product life cycle is difficult in many industries, but particularly so in the highly fragmented architecture-engineering-construction (ABC) industry. The industry currently lacks accepted standards for product data interchange which might allow applications to share the many kinds of graphical and non-graphical data produced and needed in the various stages of the ABC process. As a result, existing practice is to hand-craft interfaces between any given pair of applications at great expense and with chance for re-use. Object-oriented programming in which objects inherit attributes - describing both their state and their behavior - from more general objects in a "frame" or abstraction hierarchy, offers a powerful new approach to sharing information and knowledge in the ABC process.

This paper covers the development, present status and future directions for PMAP, an object-oriented building project model developed to facilitate the sharing of information between participants in the design, construction and operation of buildings. We describe a high level user interface developed in AutoCad to capture building component data; we show how this data is then transformed in two steps into an object-oriented building product model; and we demonstrate the feasibility and practicability of using this type of object-oriented product model for information exchange by linking it to two separate knowledge-based systems for generating construction project plans.