Evaluation of a building with respect to wind in an integrated windows environment

Abstract

Evaluating a building's performance in a windstorm has previously been a long, coitputationally intensive, manual process. It has also required the time of an expert to perform all of the calculations to insure the latest knowledge of wind/building interaction is properly used to guide the process and interpret the results. This paper presents the integration of a knowledge based expert system with more traditional algorithmic programs in an effort to automate the evaluation. The expert system uses knowledge gleaned from actual experts in wind engineering to guide the repetitive calculations and comparisons, which the algorithmic programs can accorrplish many times faster than a human. The Microsoft Windows operating system offers a number of different methods of intertask communication, user interaction, and data management. Ultimately, the user must have convenient access to the database auid knowledge base, as well as an accurate analysis of the building. Different combinations of intertask communication have been explored, noting their appropriateness in terms of memory limitations and time consumption.