Building design services in a distributed architecture

This paper describes a distributed architecture that enables the delivery of building design services over the Internet. The architecture of an individual service is three tiered. The first tier is a common communication protocol interface. The middle tier is the common product model interface. The third tier is the core of the design service. With the standardization of the first two tiers it is possible to rapidly deploy various design services, both new and legacy applications, which can be easily accessed via the Internet. As examples of building design services, the prototype implements a project manager service with a companion computer-aided design package, a disabled building code analysis service, and a service that generates and displays an accessible path for a wheelchair for a given building design using motion planning and animation techniques.