Computer Assisted Conceptual Structural Design of Steel Buildings

The design quality of a building is mostly determined during the conceptual design
stage since the succeeding design tasks generally aim at satisfying the constraints
imposed during this stage. Computers have been used extensively in structural design,
but usually in applications that have focused on well-posed procedural problems.
However, they have not been used effectively to handle an ill-structured problem such as
the conceptual design of a building structure.

The ultimate goal of our research is to develop an intelligent consultant system (ICS)
for the conceptual structural design of buildings. As an initial step towards this goal, this
study focuses on the development of a design support system that can be employed to
acquire the design control knowledge needed for a computer-based ICS. An interactive
design system, BERT Building Engineering and Reasoning Tool), has been developed
for designing moment resisting steel frame structures. Both object-oriented symbolic
and procedural programming paradigms are employed in the development of BERT.
Given the loading conditions (earthquake loads, live loads and dead loads) and building
configuration (such as the number of stories and number of frames), BERT has the capability
to design and "optimize" member sizes through reasoning about the behavior of the
structure.