Constraint Management on Distributed Design Configurations

Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) design processes involve the participation of many designers who may be working independently in geographically distinct locations. Independent designs evolve due to changes made by the designers and discipline-specific CAD applications, and these changes need to be evaluated and configured with respect to a set of project constraints for overall design consistency. In addition, each designer needs to be informed about the relevant changes made by other designers. Most rework orders result from inadequate sharing of the evolving design information between various participants in the design process. The awareness of important changes through automated constraint management can avoid expensive reworks at the later stages of the projects. In this paper, we will present an incremental approach to constraint checking in AEC design configurations. A configuration represents a design state stored in multiple databases: each configuration has a ..