Evolutionary, Unconscious Design Support for the Architectural, Engineering and Construction Industry

Abstract

The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is a complex system in which carpenters, structural designers, architects, modellers, cost estimators, planners, politicians and many others act apart together in project-specific virtual enterprises. There is a large amount of actors, an overwhelming number of ongoing processes, distributed, decentralised organisations and a variety of projects. This complicates efficient communication and supply chain integration which, according to yearly estimates, leads to a waste of between 10% and 50%. Inspired by mass production industries such as the car and ship industries, researchers introduced techniques such as Systems Engineering (SE), Building Information ModellingCopied from Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) (BIM), product modelling and object libraries in the AEC industry. It is being expected that these techniques will significantly reduce the waste if all actors in the supply chain conform to them. However, the past 20 years have shown that attempts to impose such unifying techniques on the AEC system only partially rendered the expected results. Perhaps the premises that the AEC industry is comparable to a mass production industry and that it is possible to create widely accepted standards that enable full chain integration, should be revisited. An alternative premise is that the AEC industry has the characteristics of a Complex Adaptable System (CAS). Under the pressure of design code changes, new contract forms, economical crises, new technologies, competition and such, it bends, adapts, survives and continues to produce infrastructure and buildings. Nature and the Internet are comparable examples of CAS. For example, the Internet hosts many actors, there are many processes going on, it is distributed, decentralised and it hosts a rich variety of applications / standards. Despite of major distortionsFor example, when Egypt forced providers to cut off the internet, new or alternative services like Speak to Tweet, Tor and SailMail quickly appeared. and waste due to redundant storage, spam, hacking and such, this chaotic system remains fast and reliable, and continues to produce a wealth of information. An important feature of the Internet is that it allows users to search for information, copy it and respond to it (e.g. with ratings and comments). Structural designers often lack such features for design-related information within their own enterprises. Therefore a relevant addition is to allow structural designers for lavishly and effortlessly finding, copying, publishing, comparing and improving historical products in order to mobilise enterprise knowledge and to allow for products to evolve. If products are copied often and if they are rated well, then they rise in rankingMuch like apps in a smartphone market. and become eligible to be certified. The certified products are the pieces of information that people are capable of managing and overseeing: the enterprise Conscious. Finding solutions to new problems (i.e. finding products, either from historical cases or from certified products) is the art of designers' Unconscious. Within this socio-evolutionary system, ambient intelligence forms an active mind and products evolve. Introducing a new socio-evolutionary standard at this point would violate the CAS principle that new imposed standards are unlikely to remain unchanged. Enterprises rather should create competing socio-evolutionary systems together with humanoid interfaces. The systems that best succeed at maximising a) product evolution and b) providing design assistancee.g. by comparing new problems with historical problems and their solutions, or by communicating in natural language, will survive. Thus, both products and their host environments are socio-evolutionary systems. In order to gather evidence for the above theory, various prototypes were designed, of which a simple finite element analysis tool "FrameDesign" (Section [sec:FrameDesign-and-CloudConstruct]) was the most noteworthy. With this tool, structural designers can create, calculate and share frame structures in the cloud, after which fellow structural designers are able to copy and improve them. The tool keeps track of this product evolution and visualises it to the structural designers. To date, there were ~50k active users (~160k total downloads), and ~23% of the structures they shared were evolving. The prototypes demonstrate only a small portion of the theory, and it is currently impossible to relate their use to a reduced waste rate in the AEC industry. However, future researchers are encouraged to create similar frameworks and to test them on a larger scale. Perhaps, such frameworks that allow for socio-evolving products will lead to reduced waste due to • efficient use of the corporate mind (case based reasoning) • emergence of more and better certified products that lead to more repetition (evolution) • use of existing standards (humanoid communication) In a future scenario, with having a statistically sufficient amount of (enterprise-specific) evolving products, the win-win socio-evolutionary system (Leviathan) may provide design support in the form of human-like heuristics. Sufficiently rich heuristic design support systems, combined with natural interfaces (such as voice and vision interaction) for effortless communication with humans, may form one or more useful virtual design assistants. These assistants may conglomerate in virtual enterprises (which is common to the AEC industry). This is a field of science that is known as artificial social intelligence.