# A Multi-Agent System in Education Facility Design
## 1 Introduction  
This paper deals with a multi-agent system that supports the designer in solving complex design tasks. The concept of grammar-based intelligent agents being generative subsystems that control the multi-functional design process is used. Intelligent agents communicate with each other and autonomously control the development of design subtasks. The behaviour of the design agents is modelled by sets of grammar rules. Each agent uses a graph grammar or a shape grammar and a database of facts concerning the subtask it is responsible for. Agents solving subproblems of the same kind (i.e., designing different buildings or layouts on different floors) work according to the same grammar. The course of the design process is determined by the interaction between cooperating agents. The growing interest in MAS research is due to their ability to solve problems that may be too large for a centralised single agent, to ensure reliability, and to tolerate uncertain data and knowledge. Multi-agent systems (MASs) provide a good solution for distributed control in different types of applications [1]. In all agent systems, which are combined with the generative power of grammars, agents implement grammar rules of the same type, which are either shape or graph grammar rules. As in practical design applications, different parts of solutions can have different characteristics, so agents need to have different task-specific knowledge and play different, specific roles. Therefore, in the presented approach, where designing of educational facilities is concerned, agents use two different types of grammars, both shape and graph grammars. In this paper, the proposed approach is applied to the conceptual stage of designing 3D forms of buildings and layouts of spaces in educational facilities. Educational facilities are composed of many different components (i.e., various types of ground spaces and buildings with different zones) the design of which should be based on various functional,organisational, and aesthetic requirements. Thus, designing such a facility requires integrating a form-oriented approach with a functional-structural one. The cooperation of specialised agents allows them to generate the structure of the whole grounds design and at the same time incorporate the generic 3D form of the buildings while maintaining various requirements and diverse aspects of the design process. As various elements of educational facilities have different characteristics, it is desired to design them independently only with occasional cooperation when common elements are being processed or common resources are considered [2]. The manager agent generates the arrangement of the whole facility's grounds to be compatible with the given criteria and invokes agents to design various ground spaces and buildings with their floor layouts. Space layouts of ground designs are represented by attributed graphs describing both topological structures and semantic properties of solutions. The graph grammar-based agents work in parallel on the common graph, independently generating layouts of different design components like sports facilities, playgrounds, and recreational areas while specified graph node labels representing buildings evoke agents using shape grammars. The agents designing the space arrangements use graph grammars [3] to transform graphs representing design projects, while parametric shape grammars [4] are used by agents to create forms of buildings composed of cuboids. Once the generic form of a building design is created, the graph grammar-based agents generate floor layouts. The agents' grammars jointly generate a set of graphs representing design task solutions with properties specified by graph attributes. The special set of graph node labels, which allow for the activation of different agents working on different parts of the graph [5], ensure that no two agents work at the same time on the same part of the design.