Paper ID: 2211.16406

Design Space Exploration and Explanation via Conditional Variational Autoencoders in Meta-model-based Conceptual Design of Pedestrian Bridges

Vera M. Balmer, Sophia V. Kuhn, Rafael Bischof, Luis Salamanca, Walter Kaufmann, Fernando Perez-Cruz, Michael A. Kraus

For conceptual design, engineers rely on conventional iterative (often manual) techniques. Emerging parametric models facilitate design space exploration based on quantifiable performance metrics, yet remain time-consuming and computationally expensive. Pure optimisation methods, however, ignore qualitative aspects (e.g. aesthetics or construction methods). This paper provides a performance-driven design exploration framework to augment the human designer through a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE), which serves as forward performance predictor for given design features as well as an inverse design feature predictor conditioned on a set of performance requests. The CVAE is trained on 18'000 synthetically generated instances of a pedestrian bridge in Switzerland. Sensitivity analysis is employed for explainability and informing designers about (i) relations of the model between features and/or performances and (ii) structural improvements under user-defined objectives. A case study proved our framework's potential to serve as a future co-pilot for conceptual design studies of pedestrian bridges and beyond.

Submitted: Nov 29, 2022