Building Environment Rule and Analysis (BERA) Language And its Application for Evaluating Building Circulation and Spatial Program

This study aims to design and implement a domain-specific computer programming language: the Building Environment Rule and Analysis (BERA) Language. This dissertation consists of two main parts: (1) description of the design and formal definition of the BERA Language, and (2) implementation of the BERA Language Tool and its application. The former part attempts to answer the research question, involving the effectiveness, ease of use, and extensibility of the language for end users. This front-end part is standard for all other implementations. The latter part is a practical and technical guideline for the actual development of the implementation. Implementation issues are mostly related to the building information models, their mapping into the BOM structure, and their instantiation and execution by the language. Portability of the language and platform-dependent issues are also involved in the BERA Language Tool implementation. This latter back-end part varies by implementation environments. The implementation of this study is based on the use of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) as given building information models, Solibri Model CheckerRTM (SMC) as an IFC engine, and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as a compilation and execution environment.;The proposed BERA Object Model (BOM) is a human-centered abstraction of complex state of building models rather than the computation-oriented abstraction which is generally intended to cover broad-ranged issues. BOM is one of the key concepts to the building environment rule and analysis as the language name literally implies. By using BOM, users can enjoy the ease of use and portability of pre-defined BIM data, rather than complex and platform-dependent data structures. A newly proposed BOM data structure operated on building objects, focusing on evaluating building circulation and spatial program within the scope of this research, but this study also has reviewed and demonstrated its potential for extensibility. The author realized that it is another challenge to define generic and valuable BOM as it grows more detailed. Not only its lateral extensions such as structural building elements, but also the vertical extensions such as additional properties for existing BOM objects are good examples of its extensibility. In the BERA Language Tool implementation described in this dissertation, many computed and derived properties have been proposed and implemented for the building environment rule and analysis (BERA), as well as some basic data directly from the given building model.;The BERA Language Tool is an integrated development environment for the proposed BERA Language. By using BERA Language Tool, users can evaluate their programs on their building models, focusing on both design analysis and rule checking of the purposes of building circulation and spatial programming. The proposed tool is an example implementation developed by the author. Substantial benefits can be taken from using BERA Language, and they can be summarized as follows: (1) Ease of use: Contrary to the general-purpose languages, the BERA Language is easy to use for domain experts, but still powerful to handle domain-specific problems. (2) Extensibility: the BERA Language offers an open-ended model for the human-centered abstraction of a building -- BOM. (3) Portability: BERA Language can be embedded in several other types of BIM applications such as BIM authoring tools, with consistent front-end features.;Target users of the BERA Language are domain experts such as architects, designers, reviewers, owners, managers, students, etc., rather than BIM software developers. It means that the people who are interested in the building environment rule and analysis are the potential users. The rules implemented and applied in this study involve building circulation and spatial programming. Building circulation and spatial programming are two of the crucial topics in conceptual design stages of the building project. This study presents pragmatic applications that define rules for these topics and evaluate them using the BERA Language Tool. This tool comprises many libraries to alleviate common but unnecessary problems and limitations that are encountered when users attempt to analyze and evaluate building models using commercially available tools. Combined with other additional libraries which populate rich datasets for certain purposes, the BERA Language will be fairly versatile to define rules and analyze various building environmental conditions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...