A new metamodel to represent topologic knowledge in artifactual design

This paper presents the Topology Abstraction Representation Diagram (TARD) as a new metamodel to represent knowledge about components and their relations for the purpose of Computational Design Synthesis (CDS) of artifactual routine design. TARD consists of three building blocks: elements, c-relations and h-relations. Elements represent components of an artifact by grouping parameters. C-relations represent the connectedness of the elements in the topology. H-relations model how a group of c-relations describes the composition of one level of abstraction and its relation with other levels of abstraction. One important characteristics of TARD is that topology knowledge is modeled in both a declarative fashion as well as in a procedural fashion. This enables the representation of existing artifacts as well as it models knowledge about how to configure new design artifacts. TARD decouples levels of abstractions by using explicit hierarchical relations (h-relations) and decouples the connectedness among elements by using explicit connection relations (c-relations). By doing so, each level of abstraction can be generated one independent from another.