Automated generation of circulations within a floorplan

Abstract

Various factors are considered when designing a floorplan layout, including the plan’s outer boundary, room shape and size, adjacency, privacy, and circulation space, among others. While graph-theoretic approaches have proven effective for floorplan generation, existing algorithms generally focus on defining the boundary of the plan or different room shapes, lacking the investigation of designing circulation space within a floorplan. However, the circulation design in architectural planning is a crucial factor that affects the functionality and efficiency of areas within a building. This paper presents a graph-theoretic approach for integrating circulation within a floorplan. In this study, we use plane graphs to represent floorplans and develop graph algorithms to incorporate various types of circulation within a floorplan as follows:

i. The first phase generates a spanning circulation, that is, a corridor leading to each room using a circulation graph.

ii. Subsequently, using an approximation algorithm, the circulation space is minimized, that is, generation of minimum circulation space covering all the rooms, thereby enhancing space utilization in the floorplan.

iii. Furthermore, customized circulations are generated to cater to user preferences, distinguishing between public and private spaces within the floorplan.

In addition to the theoretical framework, we have implemented our algorithms in Python and developed a user-friendly graphical interface (GUI), enabling seamless integration of our algorithms into architectural design processes.