The Extensible Orchestration Framework approach to collaborative design in architectural, urban and construction engineering

The proliferation of information technologies and the diversity of problem domains that heavily rely on software tool applications promote computer-supported cooperative work as a challenging discipline that drives the development process of contemporary and future engineering methods, standards, and tools. Consequently, a particular domain of expertise in engineering and scientific fields has emerged, demanding more advanced skills and deeper domain knowledge. The essential role of Architectural Design (AD) and Urban Planning (UP) is to enable a forward-looking approach to building/facility creation. Construction Engineering (CE) expresses its routine primarily through a transition phase that transforms ideas to sustainable urban artifacts. The CE role appears as a combination of backward and downward looking to the same process/product. All three domains are highly cooperative in the context of Environmental Engineering (EE). Currently available software tools that support the AD, UP and CE domains are far from simple. Several recent software engineering studies suggest that, instead of developing a complex “all in one solution”, the federation or orchestration of several related simple methods and tools seems promising. In this article, we discuss the basic AD, UP and CE domain-cooperation aspects and suggest an Extensible Orchestration Framework (ExOF) model that may support them. To verify the ExOF simulation and orchestration potential, we used its architectural model to orchestrate different software tools when performing the urban blocks daylight illumination simulation for different urban block morphology models. For the exact simulation, we used the normalized sun-exposition data for the city of Novi Sad, Serbia. Also presented is an illustration of the methodology, modeling and orchestration potential of ExOF for the selected case study, together with the results, obtained for typical 3D models of selected urban block morphology patterns.