Collaborative framework for building design

Software agents are autonomous decision-making systems, designed to serve specific purposes. They sense and act in suitable software environments through their reactive, proactive and deliberative capabilities. We present an agent-based software system to support collaborative design for buildings. This has been achieved through a collaborative framework specification where agent technologies can be effectively incorporated. The framework encourages modular software component interaction, and has an open and dynamic architecture accommodating various software technologies and tailoring to users' requirements. The collaborative framework aims to automate the isolated and passive nature of each aspect of building design services through agent activities. It provides distributed access for a range of building designers who are represented by their respective agents to link the domain requirements to available services of real interest within the framework. We use the domain activities of building compliance checking and building cost analysis to demonstrate how collaborative building design may be achieved. The work presents preliminary experience on the use of cutting-edge information technologies for building industries.