During the past few years, several computational design support and simulation
tools for building design have emerged, from research as well as industrial institutions.Many of these tools provide design generation and evaluation mechanisms which assist building designers to rapidly create and evaluate design alternatives. These tools normally require a relatively large input of design requirements information, from which design representations are created and evaluated. The usability of design support and evaluation systems has been adversely affected by the lack of computable representations of design requirements. Such representations can provide a repository from which the input information needed by design support and simulation systems can be generated. This thesis provides a description for a computable model of building design
requirements that supports:

• the diverse nature of information typically associated with the architectural programming stage, and
• deriving specialized representations needed by other design support and performance simulation systems.

The approach used to achieve these research goals is a framework that contains
organizing concepts and software building blocks from which representations of
design requirements can be built.The research builds on and augments the work
accomplished in SEED-Pro (the architectural programming module of SEED) by reengineering its information model. It provides contributions in the areas of architectural programming and design requirements modeling as well.

SEED