The architecture engineering and construction industries are under pressure to improve building performance, reliability and comfort while reducing operational costs and project timescales. As traditional design processes fail to address these challenges, the simulation-based generative design concept is a viable solution.
Generative design allows engineers to evaluate the impact of their design decisions, run multiple requirement-led simulations and optimise project-wide build parameters to expedite the best design solution quickly using software. It can help to provide process automation, design exploration and data analysis to futureproof the construction industry.
Generative
What is generative design?
Generative design is the process whereby inputs, and guidelines are given to an algorithm to generate hundreds, or thousands of design solutions. The process can be used to help refine existing designs, or generate new designs.
Some easy examples that you may have seen in action include:
- Parking lot layouts using just a boundary and having an AI model generate the best layout for parking stalls
- Residential unit layouts using an AI model and defining what rooms are required, generating the best unit mix and design.
- Analyzing envelope layout to create the most efficient design using AI models
Challenges in the Construction Industry
The benefits of simulation and modelling are clear. The automotive, aerospace and many other sectors have all used such tools to reduce their development timescales and costs and innovate across a broad range of use cases.
The architecture and construction sectors are different, facing a range of industry-specific challenges and operating under a set of distinctive constraints. Unlike other industries, a typical construction project is custom designed and built, often producing one product iteration – the final build. Each project can take years to complete and must work within the constraints of an individual site, which is influenced by natural, social and other location-specific factors. This limits the amount of transferable knowledge from previous builds, where organisations must often start from scratch for each project.
Yet, architecture and construction firms are tasked with creating increasingly innovative solutions where sustainability and profitability must be balanced to complete complex builds to tight deadlines and high industry standards. Because of these market demands and the technological complexity of each build, changes to the initial design plans during construction are not uncommon, which can lead to extensive delays and fines when project targets are not met.
There is little room for error thanks to these challenges, where a lack of process agility compounds this issue. A typical project lifecycle is highly linear, where one phase cannot start until the next one ends, typically running through the design, pre-construction, procurement, development and post-construction stages in succession.
However, these seemingly disparate stages are closely linked. The design stage creates the description of a new build, usually incorporating detailed plans and specifications that are created by teams of architects and engineers. The construction and development stages are the implementations of that design, where procurement balances the requirements of the entire project to find a commercially viable solution.
But today’s traditional construction methods do not allow experts to treat a project as an integrated system. Furthermore, communication across different teams is often limited, as each one takes a siloed approach to its individual project goals, making it difficult to make the right design trade-offs and decisions for the overall build.
Existing paper-based systems exacerbate these communication issues, lacking automation and preventing stakeholders from sharing information to take a holistic view of a project. This often causes problems later in the project lifecycle, where one seemingly small change to the choice of window material, for example, has a dramatic impact on the cost and power efficiency of the building.
That’s not all. This blinkered design approach does not allow architects and engineers to evaluate the future needs of a building. For example, tomorrow’s hospital buildings will have different requirements compared to today’s facilities, where the building layout and usage are likely to change dramatically as digital technologies revolutionise the healthcare industry’s people, processes and technologies. The hospitals of the future will look entirely different, where multi-purpose facilities and adaptable designs become commonplace, but today’s builds must anticipate this change.
Without simulation, it is impossible to both accommodate these future needs and address the current challenges of the construction industry to ensure its continued growth and profitability. This leaves architecture and construction companies with a choice: pursue innovation through simulation-enabled design or cling to today’s processes that don’t match the expectations and requirements of tomorrow’s world?
Introducing Generative Design
The construction industry has much to gain from simulation and modelling, where the concept of generative design is a highly beneficial solution.
Generative design is a goal-driven approach, relying on simulation to automate specific aspects of the design process and allowing engineers to quickly explore, optimise and make informed decisions for complex construction projects.
Generative Design VS Traditional Design
Let’s compare generative design to a conventional design process. Using traditional methods, a design team sits down and manually calculates the design parameters of the build, their impact on one another, offsetting these decisions against other project requirements, including the construction costs and building usage. Thousands of variables are evaluated and the entire process can take weeks or months to complete.
Using generative design, the team tells the software the results it wants. Once these parameters are defined, the computer then iterates through thousands of potential solutions to identify the best selection, under the constraints of the project requirements. Unlike DOE evaluations, these optimisation algorithms do more, seeking the best design without evaluating all the possible solutions and providing further time savings in the engineering team.
Compared to traditional design methods, this all takes place in a fraction of the time. The generative design process may also provide novel solutions, outside of the bounds of the human imagination. This frees engineers and architects from many manual tasks and gives them a broader range of design possibilities to explore, unlocking innovation in the process and allowing them to focus on the creative aspects of their work.
Human error is also eradicated and design issues are identified in the early stages of the project, which are simpler to address compared to late-stage problems when construction has started and expensive solutions are required.
Construction firms are also not encumbered by legacy technologies, allowing cross-department communication where every stage of the construction process is now linked. Architects and engineers can take a holistic view of each project, enabling informed trade-offs and empowering design teams to manage their projects more effectively and make the right design decisions.
The entire design lifecycle is accelerated and a guaranteed ROI can now be found not just during the construction phase, but also in the long-term operation of the building, thanks to the implementation of smart technologies and other novel solutions, which can now be fully explored by the design team using generative design techniques.
While simulation is an emerging technology for the construction industry, this could also be viewed as an advantage, where the cross-pollination of ideas and models from other industries allows the construction industry to hit the ground running.
Generative Design In Action
Generative design techniques have helped many construction and architecture organizations gain comprehensive insights into the impact of their design choices on building performance across the project lifecycle.
These solutions feature integration capabilities to automate the parametric modelling and 3D building simulations many firms rely on to optimize their complex build geometries. What’s more, optimization algorithms allow industry experts to assess the correlation between several requirements, including the room size, connections between rooms, thermal comfort, structural design, and so on, in order to maximize the building performance and reduce energy consumption.
This brings several benefits to these construction projects, where process automation, design exploration and data analysis can:
- Automate modelling and 3D building simulations to investigate complex geometries in less time
- Assess the correlation between several requirements through optimisation algorithms
- Support the correct formulation of the design problem with the use of design space exploration.
Structural engineers and computational architects at the Takenaka Corporation recently started to apply an optimization-driven design approach. They optimised the geometry of a new complex-shaped office building in Osaka, Japan and completed the build based on this optimised geometry. The steel pavilion-like building needed to maximise the connections between rooms and incorporate an atrium to facilitate communication between office workers. To achieve this, the firm’s architects integrated the building into a generative design platform, which automatically adjusted the design parameters and slab levels, within the constraints of the build.
Once the correlation between the slab levels and other parameters was established, the platform was used again to maximise the connection between rooms, minimise the sharp angle surface in the office spaces and maximise the sharp angle surface of the hall. The sharp angle surface is an important consideration, where architects try to reduce the number and severity of sharp angles to improve both the performance and aesthetics of the building.
Helping Projects and Designers Succeed
Generative design solutions have helped many construction projects expedite innovation across their design processes. Recently, an interactive environment was developed to incorporate product data with the geometry of a building. This allows users to interact with and analyse the design space in terms of its qualitative and quantitative performance.
In a separate project, generative design helped a high-rise building achieve zero energy use. Iterating through 1,000 evaluation and identifying the right trade-off solution for several design issues affecting the energy performance and thermal comfort of the building.
As a result, the optimised design achieved a 33 per cent reduction in the annual building’s energy consumption (from 109.12 kWh/m2 to 73.13 kWh/m2) compared to standard data provided by the current Greek legislation.
“We were able to achieve [a] 33 per cent reduction on [the] annual building’s energy consumption (from 109.12 kWh/m2 to 73.13 kWh/m2) compared to standard data provided by the current Greek legislation. Moreover, generative design and data intelligence capabilities enable us to visualize optimization trends and perform sensitivity analysis to assess the impact of the various facade parameters on the energy use and adaptive thermal comfort performance of the building,” said Evangelia Despoina Giouri, MSc who graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology, speaking in a statement.
There is a common misconception that engineering design is already optimized as best it can be, or that current technological innovations or traditional working methods can meet future challenges.
The challenges of construction projects:
- Design requirements that are too narrow in scope,
- The inability to integrate innovation into the design process at the right time,
- The high cost of exploring new solutions,
- Stakeholder engagement issues and poor communication between different departments or teams,
- Long timescales and uncertainty surrounding project deadlines.
Generative design is a fast-track method that speeds up the exploration of design options, reducing the uncertainty and risk associated with exploring innovative solutions. This approach allows engineers to evaluate new ideas and optimise solutions in a fraction of the time it would take using traditional methods.
A significant advantage of generative design is its ability to help engineers and architects explore the design space more thoroughly, often revealing hidden trade-offs between competing requirements. This allows the team to strike a better balance between performance, cost, and time constraints.
Generative design also helps construction projects become more efficient by:
- Identifying issues early, reducing the need for costly design revisions,
- Allowing engineers to evaluate multiple solutions simultaneously,
- Enabling more informed decision-making,
- Improving communication and collaboration between different teams or departments.
Case Study – A Generative Design Success Story
In a recent project, Takenaka Corporation leveraged generative design to optimise the layout of a large complex in Japan. The project required the integration of multiple factors, including the environmental impact, structural integrity, and cost-effectiveness of the building. By using generative design, the team could rapidly explore various design scenarios and identify the best solution.
Generative design played a key role in this process, enabling the team to run thousands of simulations in parallel. The result was a building design that not only met the project’s objectives but also delivered significant savings in terms of energy consumption and construction costs.
The success of this project demonstrates the value of generative design in overcoming the challenges associated with complex construction projects. By adopting this approach, construction firms can deliver better results, faster and more cost-effectively, while also reducing risk and improving stakeholder satisfaction.
A Look Ahead
As generative design tools continue to evolve, they will become increasingly integral to the construction industry. These tools will allow teams to push the boundaries of what is possible, ultimately leading to more innovative, sustainable, and cost-effective building designs.
Conclusion
Generative design is not just a trend; it’s a powerful tool that can transform the way construction projects are approached and executed. By embracing this technology, construction firms can unlock new levels of efficiency and creativity, paving the way for the future of building design.