Making decisions in planning has three prominent characteristics: multicriteria, multiparticipants, and fuzziness. A model that deals with these three properties simultaneously is presented as a promising tool for land-use planning, and its potential usefulness in group decisionmaking and for...

A sample of self-built, low-cost houses in South Africa is analysed. These designs are a synthesis of the many social, economic, and technical variables that influence the shape and meaning of house form. These variables are viewed as constituting knowledge about architecture, and the analysis...

Engineering design, a discipline of vital importance to US industry, is often perceived as lacking rigor and structure. An operational definition of engineering design is offered, to stress that representation is the key element in design. Recent developments in the field of artificial...

Based on protocol analysis of the designers solving spatial problems in architecture, a paradigm for the designers' behavior was proposed in terms of: problem (re)structuring, when problem parameters are established or transformed, and problem solving, when these parameters are satisfied in a...

The author attempts to demonstrate the use of computer graphics to provide an efficient and effective visual presentation method for tranbsprtation planning. First, the basic concept of the visual presentation method of planning is explained and the required hardware is introduced. The...

Computer graphics and its broader application as visualization are at last beginning to have an impact on the ways analysts and model builders articulate and communicate their intellectual understanding of urban systems. Geographic information systems (GIS) lie in the vanguard of these...

This paper begins with an exploration of the problem of combining the elements of group cognition, access to media, and access to computerized analysis tools into a holistic planning process. A way is then discussed in which technology can be used to help combine these activities by...

Architectural style, as a kind of nonlogical knowledge of architects, has not been embedded perfectly in the traditional knowledge-based system. In this paper, the knowledge about Yunnan housing style is given by a vocabulary and a set of generating rules in RECGRAPH, which is a kind of...

One way to tailor analysis to the special information needs of multiparty decision- making processes is discussed. A scenario-based multiattribute trade-off analysis framework is described that parallels the stages in negotiated decisionmaking, focusing on the key task of evaluating trade-offs...