2004/03/21 by Omid Banyasad, Banyasad, Omid, Philip T. Cox +1
Computer Science · Engineering · #BIM and Construction Integration #Design Education and Practice #Manufacturing Process and Optimization #cs.LO #cs.PL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cs/0403033
20 pages, 15 figures, to be published in The Theory and Practice of Logic programming (TPLP)
arxiv created 2004/03/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
Computer Aided Design systems provide tools for building and manipulating models of solid objects. Some also provide access to programming languages so that parametrised designs can be expressed. There is a sharp distinction, therefore, between building models, a concrete graphical editing activity, and programming, an abstract, textual, algorithm-construction activity. The recently proposed Language for Structured Design (LSD) was motivated by a desire to combine the design and programming activities in one language. LSD achieves this by extending a visual logic programming language to incorporate the notions of solids and operations on solids. Here we investigate another aspect of the LSD approach; namely, that by using visual logic programming as the engine to drive the parametrised assembly of objects, we also gain the powerful symbolic problem-solving capability that is the forte of logic programming languages. This allows the designer/programmer to work at a higher level, giving declarative specifications of a design in order to obtain the design descriptions. Hence LSD integrates problem solving, design synthesis, and prototype assembly in a single homogeneous programming/design environment. We demonstrate this specification-to-final-assembly capability using the masterkeying problem for designing systems of locks and keys.