An environment to support computer-assisted design review

In recent years productivity of the U.S. construction industry has lagged behind other sectors of the economy, resulting in higher costs of goods and services for all consumers. Construction productivity can be enhanced by the increased use of automation in the facility delivery process. The review of design drawings is one manual operation that could benefit from increased automation. Design reviews are currently performed by human experts who evaluate a set of construction documents for adequacy and accuracy. Errors or omissions in the construction documents that are not detected by the human reviewers can result in increased construction time and costs and decreased construction productivity. This research examines the feasibility of linking a knowledge-based system (KBS) with a computer-aided design and drafting (CADD) program to create an environment to support interactive computer-assisted design reviews. The basic approach used in developing the Computer-Assisted Design Review and Evaluation (CADRE) system was to analyze design review comments prepared by human experts, then define a computer environment to replicate the reasoning processes that had been applied. During this research 1,469 manually-generated design comments from historical projects were collected and reviewed. A total of 715 comments were identified and analyzed that specifically addressed the construction drawings. The analysis of these design review comments was then used to create an object-oriented facility model and to develop a knowledge base for automated design review. This research found that approximately 75 percent of the design review comments could have been duplicated by a computer system based on an IBM-compatible personal computer using off-the-shelf software.