Towards Controlled Grammars: Approaches to Automating Rule Selection for Shape Grammars

Thomas Grasl and Athanassios Economou

Emine Mine Thompson

Fusion - Proceedings of the Thirty Second Conference on Education and Research in Computer-Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe)

eCAADe 32

2

357-363

Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK

2014

000361385100037

Shape grammars, Interpreter, Rule selection, Conflict resolution

An approach to automating the rule selection process of shape grammars is introduced. The methods presented are divided into two approaches: Extensive enumeration and goal directed generation. Complete design catalogue enumeration is interesting only when the results are small. Bigger numbers are useful only to the extent they give a sense of the upper boundary of the set of possibilities specified by the grammar. Smaller numbers are useful because they allow an actual, constructive and meaningful visual encounter with these possibilities. Goal directed design generation is essentially an attempt to reduce the grammars solution space and filter out only those solutions that are of interest and may be given for any desired subset of the complete set of designs specified by the grammar. A shape grammar interpreter is extended here by a computational framework to allow the rule selection to be executed by agents. Hereby each agent is based on a different paradigm taken from the field of artificial intelligence. The results are compared.