A STEP Towards a Computer based Integrated Building Design System

Building design is a multi-actor and multi-task process. In a design project architects, engineers and other specialists need to exchange information in order to produce a coherent design. These design participants often have different views of the design from their own perspectives. The aim of an integrated building design system is to develop a building data model that integrates all views so that building information can be exchanged in electronic form between the designers and also throughout various design stages. This paper introduces an integrated building design system developed as part of the European project, Computer Models for the Building Industry in Europe. It concentrates on the development of the Data Exchange System which is a central data repository implemented using an object oriented database and ISO STEP technology and it is able to support concurrent engineering, versioning, history tracing and other data transaction managemen