Performance-driven digital design and robotic fabrication based on topology optimisation and multi-agent system
Creators: name: Bao, Dingwen
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 400510
subject: Structural engineering

description: Since the 21st century, the rapid development of computer technology has brought new inspiration to the long-standing topic of the relationship between architecture, structure, and environment. Performance data have become the driving force for new design and fabrication methods.

Nowadays, in the field of engineering, computer-aided design methodologies, such as finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics and, have become essential in evaluating architectural and structural designs. However, these engineering analysis techniques have not become widespread for architectural design form-finding. On the other hand, with the development of digital architecture theory, form-finding technology based on biological patterns has gradually moved from avant-garde design to actual practice. As a result, bionic computational design techniques, such as swarm intelligence algorithm and multi-agent system, have become more popular; and architects can assign the behavioural logic in nature to architectural design form-finding so that biological, environmental response strategies can be reproduced in intelligent tectonics. However, this emergent design methodology is often difficult to obtain data feedback from the building itself and its performance, and hardly form the mainstream design strategy in architectural practice. In this context, applying the data of structural performance to multi-agents to realise the research of computational design driven by performance will help break through the above dilemma and provide new ideas to architects and engineers.

Both bi-directional evolutionary structural optimisation (BESO) for topology optimisation method and multi-agent system from swarm intelligence algorithm are emergent technologies developed into new approaches that transform performance-based architectural &amp; structural design. This thesis posits a performance-driven design methodology that establishes a complementary relationship between topological optimisation, behavioural multi-agent algorithms, architectural design, and robotic fabrication.

Firstly, the thesis systematically explores and evaluates the application of topology optimisation and multi-agent algorithms in a form-finding design process and, later, robotic fabrication through literature review, case studies and a series of architectural scale prototypes. 

Through a combination of natural inspiration, topology optimisation, multi-agent systems and robotic fabrication, the thesis also establishes a new connection between two dichotomous principles: architectural complexity and structural performance. It demonstrates the process of testing two digital design methods and integrating these two algorithms to establish a real-time structural feedback loop in designing intricate forms. 

Finally, the thesis describes a hybrid of architectural and structural performance behaviours by integrating multi-agent generative design algorithms and the BESO method and the closeness of their interaction. This approach creates a negotiation between architectural design concerns and structural optimisation in a simultaneous generative approach. It is an essential shift from the normative sequential workflows that either inform generative approaches with structural analysis or operate sequentially to optimise the complex geometries already created within generative processes structurally. 

At the same time, the complexity and intricacy of the geometry generated through this process are demonstrated to be feasible to build through robotic fabrication with large-scale additive manufacturing. A series of installations have been completed to prototype and compare two individual approaches and an integrated method at a small scale, to understand the implications of long-span large spatial structures.

Overall, this thesis has contributed to the research field of performance-driven digital design and fabrication. It offers a new approach that enables creating a complex, expressive architectural form that is highly efficient in material and structural performance. This approach also has the potential to create a closer collaboration between architect and structural engineer in the early stages of design and to avoid the structural rationalisation of unfeasible architectural forms in the architectural, engineering and construction  industry The new method also seeks the ornamental complexities in architectural forms and most efficient use of material based on structural performance in the process of generating complex geometry of the building and its various elements, later for the market of mass customisation manufacturing.