Com o objetivo de auxiliar o projetista na fase de projeto físico, são especificadas duas ferramentas: ferramenta de cabeamento estruturado e ferramenta de seleção de equipamentos. A primeira opera como um sistema de CAD/CAE permitindo que o projetista elabore as plantas civil, de instalação elétrica e da infra-estrutura de comunicação de andares de um prédio ou de um campus e desenvolva o seu projeto de cabeamento estruturado. Para tanto, essa ferramenta verifica as regras de projeto para cada ação executada pelo projetista, implementa tais regras, quando estiver operando em modo automático, e auxilia o projetista na seleção dos componentes de distribuição mais adequados ao projeto. A segunda ferramenta implementa um driver da metodologia proposta. Permite que o projetista especifique as sub-redes do ambiente de redes a ser projetado e o auxilia na seleção da tecnologia e dos equipamentos mais apropriados para cada uma dessas sub-redes. No caso especifico da seleção da tecnologia e equipamentos de rede, essa ferramenta determina o conjunto de tecnologias e equipamentos que podem ser empregados em cada sub-rede, aplicando regras de projeto e utilizando informações sobre tecnologias e equipamentos de rede cadastrados na sua base de dados sobre as características do ambiente de informática considerado e os requisitos de projeto fornecidos pelo próprio projetista.

Today, networks are assuming an increasing importance in all kinds of companies, like bureau of services, bank organizations, shopping stores, educational institutions and hospitals, among others. As a consequence, it's becoming more important to offer to these companies high quality network designs, that could warranty the return of the investments made. A high quality design should fulfil the company needs, the addition of new services as the information system evolves and be capable of implementation according to the company budget and time constraints. To achieve this goal it is important to count with a powerful local network design methodology and with designers with strong theoretical and practical knowledge. The designer should apply such methodology and the corresponding designing rules to define the most appropriate network technology and equipments. Inside this context, the purpose of this work is to propose a local network design methodology for environments spanning from a few floors of a building comprising a campus and the supporting software tools for its applications. The proposed methodology consists of various phases: collecting all the information concerning the needs and characteristics of the company's present computing environment, their future trends and the development of the physical and logical network design. With exception of the logical networks design, that is out of the scope of this work, this methodology specifies the inputs, the procedure and the expected results for each phase. With the purpose of helping the designer during the physical network design phase two software tools are speciufied: structured cabling tool and equipment selection tool. The first one run like a CAD/CAE the electrical installation and the communication infrastructure for the building and campus and todevelop of the structured cabling solution. In order to accomplish these objectives, this tool verifies the designing rules for each action, implements these rules when operating in the automatic mode, and helps the designer in the selection of the most suited distribution components. The second tool implements a driver of the proposed methodology. It allows the designer to specify the sub-networks (workgroups and backbone networks) and helps with the selection of the most suited technology and network equipments for each sub-network. This tool also chooses the set of technologies and network equipments the could be used in each sub-network. It provides these choices based on the designing rules, on a database of technologies and equipments and on the characteristic of the computing environment and the design requirements provide by the designer. The use of the proposed methodology and its supporting tool's warranties the targeted quality and precision for any network design, organize its applications and give the necessary information allowing the designer to specify the desired solution.