Möbius evolver: Competitive exploration of urban massing strategies

During the early stages of design exploration, competing design strategies are typically considered. This chapter presents a design method, supported by a novel type of evolutionary algorithm, that maintains a heterogeneous population of design variants based on competing design strategies. Each strategy defines its own search space of design variants, all sharing a common generative concept or idea. A population of design variants is evolved through a process of selection and variation. As evolution progresses, some design strategies will become extinct while others will gradually dominate the population. A demonstration is presented showing how a designer can explore competing strategies by running a series of iterative evolutionary searches. The evolutionary algorithm has been implemented on a cloud platform, thereby allowing populations design variants to be processed in parallel. This results in a significant reduction in computation time, allowing thousands of designs to be evolved in just a few minutes.