Logic Models of Design

This monograph places design in a theoretical context which applies developments in knowledge-based systems, logic programming and planning to design. It addresses two important design issues: the interpretation of designs, which concerns the discovery of implicit design attributes, a key activity in design evaluation that can be modelled by deductive inference in logic programming; and the process of generation, whereby a design description is produced which exhibits these implicit design attributes. Implicit attributes can be seen as analogous to the semantic content of natural language utterances. The work presented here is mainly concerned with design generation, and an operational model of design is investigated in which operations on processes are treated in a similar way to operations on form. It is argued that there are advantages in representing control knowledge as rules in a design system, and that logic is an effective medium for this purpose. This is demonstrated by means of programs developed in Prolog and C using the example of spatial layout in buildings. Primarily, this book is directed at those in artificial intelligence (AI) involved in logic programming, planning and expert systems. However, since AI techniques are finding widespread application in industry, the use of an architectural design example makes this work relevant to architects, designers, engineers and developers of intelligent architectural design software.