An agent-based cooperation platform for fire protection planning
Uwe Rüppel, Udo Meißner, Michael Lange · TUbilio (Technical University of Darmstadt) · 2006
One major aim in computer-aided engineering is to support the engineers in communication and collaboration during the building planning process. In order to realize this, new approaches and methods are being developed in the priority research program 1103 “Network- based cooperative planning processes in civil engineering” of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The presented project is part of this priority research program. Since the model based planning becomes accepted in the building industry we assume planners to work on partial models. As the planning process of building projects is characterized by the cooperation of many experts the partial models are highly interrelated. This paper presents an agent-based cooperation platform to support planners involved in fire protection planning by linking the distributed partial models together, preserving their consistency and giving the possibility of an automated regulations-check-up of the models. Different types of agents and their roles in the cooperative process are described. Agents for communication, for the acquisition of information and for knowledge processing in fire protection engineering are introduced. The possibility to check-up planning information for consistency and compliance with the fire protection regulations at an early state of the planning process enables a comprehensive diagnosis of the design and leads to a reduction of planning errors.