Evolutionary design using grammatical evolution and shape grammars : designing a shelter

A new evolutionary design tool is presented, which uses shape grammars and a grammar-based form of evolutionary computation, grammatical evolution (GE). Shape grammars allow the user to specify possible forms, and GE allows forms to be iteratively selected, recombined and mutated: this is shown to be a powerful combination of techniques. The potential of GE and shape grammars for evolutionary design is examined by attempting to design a single-person shelter to be evaluated by collaborators from the University College Dublin School of Architecture, Landscape, and Engineering. The team was able to successfully generate conceptual shelter designs based on scrutiny from the collaborators. A number of avenues for future work are highlighted arising from the case study.