Object Oriented Approach Applied to Construction

Knowledge representation through object oriented approaches is inducing more and more applications for construction in European countries. Such a formalism allows to describe and handle intricate structures of objects, and to express and maintain several kinds of constraints upon these objects. In this paper, we draw a survey of the French works including this approach, in order to show the various levels of implementation. We also present the studies carried out at the SCIENTIFIC and technical center for BUILDING (CSTB), in France, focusing on applications to building thermal analysis, developed using two computing tools issued from research laboratories : on the one hand, an expert system shell (SMECI), dedicated to engineering design problems and implementing an object oriented formalism to structure its knowledge base ; on the other hand, a software (ROSALIE) designed for elaboration of data conceptual models, and based on an entity-relationship formalism improved by object oriented concepts. Finally, we mention how SMECI environment has been used to implement a new kind of design expert system for specification contentment in engineering.