Considerations regarding decision support tools for conceptual building design

The A/E/C (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry is very traditional. In contrast to other industries (e.g. car or ship industry) no prototypes are trialled and tested before manufacturing. Each building is unique, thereby excluding large scale production. Over the past thirty years, computers have become ubiquitous even in the AEC industry. Yet in building design we are still exchanging data and making design decisions as a century ago, with paper drawings and reports. Although building design support tools are used for design confirmation at the end of the design process, important decisions are already made in the conceptual design stage. This paper elaborates the above in more detail and reports findings of two research activities as indicated below. Firstly, this paper summarizes the results of interviews with world leading building services professionals. These results indicate current practice and more importantly wishes for the future. Secondly, the current state of the research on evolutionary and adaptive computational support techniques for conceptual design search and optimization is discussed. The paper finishes with indicating trends for future work.