A descriptive grammar for generating housing briefs on line

The ultimate goal of the described research is a process for mass customizing housing based on computer-aided design and production systems. The current goal is the development of an interactive system for generating solutions on the Web based on a modeling approach called discursive grammar. A discursive grammar consists of a description grammar, a shape grammar, and a set of heuristics. The description grammar generates design briefs based on user data; the shape grammar provides the rules for generating designs in a particular style, and the set of heuristics guides the generation of designs towards a solution that matches the design brief. This paper is concerned with a description grammar that encodes Portuguese housing regulations.