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Archie-II is a case-based design aid (CBDA) for the conceptual design of buildings. It is the longest running and best developed CBDA project, having seem some initial trials with architecture students, and building towards more extensive course-related use this winter. The work has been carried out as part of a long standing collaboration between the AI group in the Georgia Tech College of Computing and members of Tech's College of Architecture.
Archie, like all CBDAs, contains documentation and evaluations of existing designs. The goal is to capture and disseminate lessons learned from design experience, especially when those lessons are not easily incorporated into a field's theoretical framework, and when those lessons bear on the early stages of design. Archie starts with building floor plans (currently from several courthouses and libraries), and supplements those with stories about how those buildings actually function. The intent is to capture design data and lessons covering the early design of important genre of public buildings so that future architects can avoid repeating the mistakes (and can capitalize on the successful innovations) of those who went before them.
Work on CBDAs has proliferated since the Archie project began several years ago. The MIDAS project, for instance, is a good example of how ideas first developed in Archie can be applied in other complex conceptual design domains, such as initial design of aircraft subsystems. The efforts to generalize Archie have resulted in a general shell for constructing CBDAs, called Design-MUSE.
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