A standards processing framework

Civil engineers create and employ a very large number of design standards, especially in the United States. Designing using such a large number of design standards is a tedious, laborious, and difficult task. One major research task in Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) is the development of software tools that assist in the usage of design standards during the design process. This dissertation, a standards processing framework is presented. It is an agent-based approach to providing computer-aided support for using design standards. In this framework, modules, such as standards processing servers, are treated as agents communicating using a defined communication language. One immediate advantage of this architecture is that it allows the incorporation of a broad, powerful set of representation for use in modeling design standards.