Application of a Collaborative Web Tool for Structural Design Projects in the Architectural Field

Recently, in the architectural design process, the opportunity to use parametric modeling software has largely increased. This software is very useful to make and visualize the architectural design studies. Parametric studies with the use of automation or optimization tools helped designers and engineers achieve high quality design also considering multiple requirements, such as cost and structural objectives. However, it is difficult to seamlessly share results between engineers building automation programs and designers. For example, when manipulating a large amount of results or visualizing results, it is often necessary to install a dedicated tool on the designer's PC. Also, when optimizing a model which is complicated and has many parameters, the resources of the execution PC are consumed for a long time. In such a case, a collaborative web tool, which offers an optimization environment in the cloud, is very effective in solving the problem of data sharing between engineers and designers. This presentation will introduce our case study and illustrate how we seamlessly shared the analysis results and complex simulation projects with project teams by using VOLTA.