Analogy, Exploration and Generalization: Three Activities for Knowledge-Based Architectural Design Systems

We propose in this article a system architecture based on reasoning through analogy with past cases or situations. Starting with a project and a sketch provided by the user, the system locates analogous situations in the past and uses these to improve a problem's description. A sufficiently improved description will in turn activate a constraint-satisfaction mechanism. Previous situations are stored in a memory bank of objects that match the description of past problems to the generic descriptions of past solutions. Three mechanisms can be distinguished within the system: an analogy mechanism collects hypotheses about the variables and constraints to be satisfied in past situations, an exploratory mechanism searches through the solution space, a generalizing mechanism looks at experiences and memorizes only what is needed to collect hypotheses