The function of a design environment is to support the problem-solving activities of a team of agents, where no single agent is capable of performing the overall design task. The performance of a design environment is determined by how efficient it is in managing the problem-solving activities of its agents. Facility development presents a number of challenges for design environments. In order to be useful to the construction community, design environments must exhibit a great degree of flexibility in dealing with changing the tools used in the various tasks of the facility development process. In addition, design environments must be able to react gracefully to changes in their problem-solving strategies. These two requirements are derived from the lack of standardized problem-solving procedures and are a reflection of the disjoint and diverse nature of the construction industry.

This paper describes a new approach to building design environments and illustrates the advantages of this approach by highlighting the control architecture of the Integrated Building Design Environment (IBDE). IBDE was developed in the Design Systems Laboratory of the Engineering Design Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University. IBDE is intended to serve as a tested for the exploration of issues of tool integration, process control, and information exchange in the facility development process. The scope of IBDE is the design and construction management of speculative high rise office buildings. The current version of IBDE integrates nine knowledge-based tools performing architectural, structural, and foundation design and construction planning.

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