Integration of reasoning systems in architectural modeling activities

In the first phase of a design process, the designer understands the problem and assimilates it to a conceptual framework that is already known to him. Due to the nature of design problems, the reasoning methods and techniques for modeling are not uniform and clear. An integrated reasoning system is proposed for modeling the architectural processes. Such a system may help designers to make decisions based on past experiences as well as domain theory. The performance of the integration approach is compared with the pure case-based and rule-based reasoning systems to study the efficiency and effectiveness in the same domains. The study tried to identify the reasoning systems used by designers pertaining to the interior design applications. © 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.