Title:
A design methodology for Design Exploration, Analysis and Simulated Robotic Fabrication
Keywords:
generative design, multi-objective design optimization , multi-agent systems, robotic fabrication, simulation , design performance, design decision making
Credits:
Evangelos Pantazis, Alan Wang, David Gerber, Burcin Becerik-Gerber
Description:
For contemporary design practices, there still remains a disconnect between design tools used for early stage design exploration, for performance analysis and those used for fabrication and construction of highly complex tectonic architectural systems. The research presented here brings forward downstream fabrication constraints and opportunities into the up-stream design exploration and design decision-making. The variety of technologies and methods used for different design phases such as design generation, simulation, manufacturing and construction planning often lead to interoperability issues among these highly coupled design phases. This paper addresses the issue of developing an integrated digital design workflow and details a research framework for the incorporation of environmental performance into a robotic fabrication for early stage design exploration and generation of alternative façade designs. The method allows the user to import a design surface, define design parameters, set a number of environmental performance objectives and then select a robotic construction strategy. Based on these inputs, design alternatives are generated and evaluated in terms of their performance criteria in concert with their robotically simulated constructability. In order to validate the proposed framework an experimental case study of an office building is developed to explore and evaluate façade designs generatively created from a multi-agent system for design methodology. Initial results define a heuristic function for improving the simulated robotic constructability and illustrate the functionality of our prototype, and limitations and future research steps are discussed.