The perspective approach: Enabling engineers to construct and integrate views and generate an evolving project model

Architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) projects today require the expertise of sometimes thousands of engineers. These engineers conceptualize the project in ways that are suited to their specific tasks. To help them perform these design, planning and execution tasks, they construct task-specific views of the project. The work of an engineer often impacts the work of other engineers; therefore these views must somehow be integrated as the project unfolds through time. Ideally, engineers could automatically construct and integrate task-specific views. Many current project-modeling approaches construct and integrate a predefined central model from which task-specific views are automatically constructed. Others construct and integrate a federation of predefined task-specific views. This thesis presents industry test cases that illustrate that the multi-disciplinary, constructive, iterative, and unique character of AEC projects makes it difficult to implement these approaches and that engineers should be able to formalize and manage the dependencies between views themselves. To address these difficulties, this thesis formalizes the Perspective Approach to enable an engineer to construct a task-specific dependent engineering view, called a Perspective, by formalizing its dependency on source Perspectives. Engineers use composable, subsumable, modifiable reasoning modules, called Perspectors, to specify the nature of the dependency. Engineers can compose Perspectives and Perspectors into directed acyclic graph structures that specify complex transformations of source Perspectives into a dependent Perspective. The Perspective Approach formalizes simple Management Processes that assist engineers to iteratively control the integration of Perspectives. A Project Model emerges as a directed acyclic graph of task-specific Perspectives and dependencies between Perspectives. This thesis retrospectively implements two test cases from the design and construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall to show how engineers could automatically construct and control the integration of these views more quickly, accurately and completely than possible on this state of the art project. The validation also shows that several of the Perspectors were reused in both test cases: it may be possible to define a small number of reusable Perspectors, potentially a language, which engineers can learn to use. The Perspective Approach is intended to enable engineers to engage in automated, integrated design and analysis.