Design decision support in early design phases by similarity determination of digital building models

Architects' daily work consists of designing various building concepts for a given construction project and continuously customizing them to the client's specifications and requirements. Knowledge from previous projects is incorporated into this process so that digitally created building models can be used as an inspiration within an agency. But architects typically design a building from scratch, so creating and customizing different variants for design decisions are very costly and time-consuming. Public availability of different building models is very limited and manual comparisons of different building designs is error-prone and challenging. Therefore, I am going to improve this inefficient process by introducing a decision support tool and make the architects' knowledge reusable. For decision support, Case-Based Reasoning is adapted to enable automatic comparisons of building models and requirements. Identified similar buildings or building parts thus enable future problems to be solved by customizing previous decisions. The necessary reuse of internal knowledge is ensured by a case base that contains different design solutions made available as explicit knowledge to everyone.