Approach to handle architectural flexibility requirements for automated structural design proposals of steel concrete office buildings in early design phases

Future architectural design procedures need to address environmental sustainability issues early in the design processes. We develop software tools to provide rapid structural design proposals in response to early volumetric architectural design studies for office buildings with steel concrete composite structures. The objective is to share engineering and construction knowledge in architectural design iteration steps to communicate necessary construction heights and grids for beam, column and slab layouts and to estimate the material consumption and the carbon footprint to be expected. We have so far developed a methodology to generate structural design models that have optimized sustainability performance using a genetic algorithm approach to find appropriate solutions.