The objective of this PhD research project by Jakob Beetz is to facilitate the use of external knowledge from various resources and domains in a building design project. At design time, the designer has to take many external factors into consideration that affect the quality and performance of the building – especially in the early phases of the design. Unfortunately though, much of these additional factors are not accessible or take a long time to be calculated.
This project combines product modelling standards (IFC) and semantic web technology (OWL) with multi-agent technology to develop a framework for agents that represent expert knowledge from a particular discipline, such as an HVAC consultant. Agents can also be developed to represent building components that are required to manifest certain behaviour in a building, e.g. a ventilation unit. In both case, the agent is an autonomous software objects that can be given a task in a certain context, such as making sure that the required performance can be achieved in the design.
Jacob received his PhD in 2009 and is now professor at Aachen University.