Smart Restrictions: Keeping Buyer Choices Buildable

One of the foundational ideas of concept-based construction is that a buyer should only ever be able to make choices that result in a buildable home. It sounds simple. In practice, it's where most configurators fall apart.

The reason: choices in construction are not independent. Pick a deeper extension and the dormer placement might no longer fit. Move the kitchen island and the gas line needs rerouting. The interactions between options are dense, sometimes counter-intuitive, and very expensive to discover after the contracts are signed.

We've extended the Alpha configurator with a system we call restrictions and consequences. Restrictions describe what's allowed — for example, "if option A is chosen, option B must not be chosen". Consequences describe what happens automatically when an incompatibility shows up.

The new piece is the auto-fix. When a buyer selects an option that makes a previously valid choice impossible, the system doesn't just throw a warning. It automatically switches the affected option to a valid alternative, in a single step, and shows the buyer exactly what changed and why. The buyer sees a clean, always-buildable configuration. The complexity is handled by the platform.

For the concept manager who actually writes these rules, we've sharpened the editor too. Restrictions can be created in bulk with a side-by-side preview, conflicts between rules are detected up-front, and a sandbox mode lets you test your rule set against hypothetical buyer scenarios before it ever goes live.

The same engine now runs across every part of the platform: the project editor sidebar, the buyer configurator, the house viewer, the BIM-side processing. One source of truth for what's allowed, what's not, and what happens when the two collide.

The result: fewer surprises later in the chain. A buyer's configuration is always coherent, always buildable, and always reflects the rules the concept manager actually wrote — without anyone having to manually double-check.