Integrated Data Exchange and Concurrent Design for Engineered Facilities 1

The architecture-engineering-construction industry is highly fragmented, both vertically (between project phases, e.g., planning, design, and construction) and horizontally (between specialists at a given project phase, e.g., design). We need software that (1) translates and communicates project data dynamically, overcoming both logical barriers (differing views of overlapping data) and physical barriers (data distribution); and (2) detects, analyzes, and manages changes efficiently during concurrent design processes. We have a software prototype, KADBASE, that addresses the distributed query problem. In addition, we are adapting and applying a high-level constraint language to support distributed constraint processing for preliminary design.