| authors |
Galle, Per |
| year |
1987 |
| title |
A Formalized Concept of Sketching in Automated Floor Plan Design |
| source |
177 p. 1987. DIKO Research Report No.87/3 |
| summary |
CADLINE has abstract only. Automated floor plan design, though originally motivated by the difficulties encountered by architects manually designing building layouts, raise several questions that may be of relevance to related application areas as well. e.g. design of electronic circuitry. One such question is, 'how do we come from a given set of constraints on size and placement of rooms (components) to a set of floor plans (circuit layouts) that satisfy these constraints?' In manual architectural design, sketches are used as an intermediate step. The present work is a study of a number of formalizations of the sketch concept which have been or could be used in computer- generation of architectural floor plans. A particular type of sketch, called the 'delta-derivative', is suggested and developed. The delta-derivative of a desired solution plan is an approximation of that solution plan and usually several other similar or 'equivalent' solutions. The idea is to generate sketches ('abstract' plans) before solutions ('concrete' plans), because they are simpler to compute, weeding out sketches that are not 'promising', and trying to refine the remaining sketches into solutions proper, thus limiting the amount of combinatorial search. Several abstraction levels of sketches may be used in this process. However, constraints as specified by the user of an automated design system are assumed to apply to the solutions; therefore a major theoretical problem which is addressed in the report is the derivation of sketch-level constraints that define which sketches to be generated. A comprehensive floor plan design system based on these ideas has been implemented, and empirical results are reported which confirms certain predicted advantages of delta-derivatives but also shows that the sketch-level constraints based on the developed theory are too weak if used alone; they allow generation of too many sketches which cannot possibly be refined into solutions. The report finally conjectures a solution to this problem |
| keywords |
CAD, planning, architecture, floor plans, design, combinatorics, programming, abstraction |
| series |
CADline |
| last changed |
1999/02/12 15:08 |
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