Determining the structural layout of orthogonal framed buildings

When designing framed commercial buildings, achieving a satisfactory column layout is one of the primary objectives. Design systems to help designers with conceptual building design have, over the last decade, been developed using evolutionary algorithms. However, one limiting feature of the methods which have been developed is that the representation is limited to rectangular buildings. Most buildings are not rectangular and so this is a significant deficiency. A method of determining column layouts for orthogonal buildings is developed using the sweep line algorithm coupled to an adjacency graph. The method is tested on various examples and is shown to work well unless the building shape results in a large number of partitions.