Food4Rhino

Design Space Exploration (DSE) is a suite of open-source Grasshopper tools originally developed by Digital Structures at MIT.  These tools support visual, performance-based design space exploration and interactive multi-objective optimization (MOO) for conceptual design.  These tools can be used flexibly with other Grasshopper components or plug-ins to take a variety of approaches to DSE and MOO, including a priori, a posteriori, and interactive articulation of performance priorities.  DSE components allow the user to sample a parametric design space made from sliders, automatically iterate and capture images and numerical properties, reconstruct previous designs, cluster designs into families, analyze the importance of design variables, approximate computationally-intensive performance evaluations, and find Pareto fronts for multi-objective problems.   The components link together for simple, automated workflows for performance-based design of buildings and other structures.  Members of the Building Design Group at Penn State have contributed to recent updates.  More info can be found here:  

Github | User Manual | Digital Structures | Building Design Group

The download for DSE also includes (1) Stormcloud, which allows for parametric exploration using an interactive evolutionary framework, combining quantitative performance analysis with qualitative designer input; (2) Radical, for constrained optimization; and (3) Stepper, for interactive gradient-based optimization.  These optimization tools can work with any model and geometry type that can be represented and analyzed in Grasshopper, as long as design variables and objectives are present.

To install, remove all previous versions of DSE, unblock, and extract entire .zip file into Grasshopper components folder, retaining the file structure.

To use MOO to run multi-objective optimization, you must also download log4net.dll independently and add it to the Components folder containing MOO.gha.  The .dll file can be found here: https://logging.apache.org/log4net/download.html
                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
Some components released under LGPLv2 license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html).  See Readme for details.