PERSPECTORS: Automating the construction and coordination of multidisciplinary 3D design representations

We formalize a multidisciplinary project model as a directed acyclic graph of dependencies between representations. For the nodes of this graph, we formalize a generic representation, called a “perspective,” which contains “features” that describe the design for a specific task. These features contain data types such as 3D surfaces, lines, and points, as well as relationships to other features. For the arcs of this graph, we formalize a generic reasoning mechanism, called a “perspector,” which analyzes any number of “source perspectives” to produce one “dependent perspective.” Engineers from different disciplines use perspectors to transform source perspectives into dependent perspectives that are useful for their tasks. Dependent perspectives serve as source perspectives for other dependent perspectives, leading to a self-organizing graph of dependencies between perspectives. We describe this approach with two multidisciplinary engineering problems from the Walt Disney Concert Hall (WDCH). Perspectors and perspectives enable engineers to use design representations that share a common theoretical foundation. They allow engineers to automatically generate task-specific representations from representations produced by other engineers.