A design automation development process for building and bridge design

The increasing industrialization and standardization of construction opens up for the field of design automation. Such applications, for buildings and infrastructural products, are starting to appear by using software from the manufacturing industry. A challenge is, however, to develop such design automation applications since approaches combining product analyses, requirements management, and development of product platforms and configurators are lacking for construction. Using a bottom up approach to study existing best practice and create more general approaches is one way. In this paper we study the design automation development process from three cases; 1) edge beams, focusing on requirements management, 2) outer non-bearing walls, considering configurator development, and 3) end frame bridge superstructures, featuring the development of generic analysis procedures. These three processes are analyzed and merged into a more generic process which can be used to guide future developments of design automation applications within construction