Keywords:

Abstract:

Shape grammars play an important role in a new generation of tools for the
analysis and design of products. Up until now there has been numerous attempts
to create a general shape grammar interpreter, but most of the existing tools
are either very specific in their purpose, have
only limited functionality or were programmed for one operating system. In this
work we present a tool named Shape Grammar Interpreter (SGI) for
the automatic generation of designs. The developed shape grammar framework
allows designers to automatically
synthetise designs and to actively participate in the generation process.
Great effort has
been devoted to provide an interactive way of
defining shapes and later using them in shape grammar rules and designs'
generation process. The tool implements two different types of algorithms for
the generation of designs.
First, tree-search algorithms which store the state of the generation
process in a tree structure and uses traditional tree-search algorithms to find the next rule
to apply. Second, and most importantly, an
optimized subshape detection algorithm. Hence, subshapes of the existing shapes
can be detected and used in the generation process obtaining not only a wider
set of designs but potentially more appealing ones.
In this paper we also describe the architecture of the framework and provide a performance
evaluation of proposed algorithms, showing a significant gain in performance.
Potential applications of our research can be found in the educational field
(i.e. architecture and arts) and in the automatic generation of architectural,
mechanical and product designs.

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