Real-time management of spatial information of design: A space-based floor plan representation of buildings

The current trend towards globalization forces the AEC community to change its practical approach from a non-systematic, labor-intensive to a systematic one. Based on the paradigm shifted from ‘drawing’ to ‘constructing’ in architectural design practice, this paper focuses on developing a new type of CAD system that automatically constructs and manages well-structured floor plans with minimum geometrical input from the designer. The paper also took advantage of the building data models developed from the prior research. The model includes hierarchical building components such as ‘building’, ‘plan’, ‘space’, ‘ring’, ‘wall skeleton’, ‘surface’, ‘column’, etc. The creation algorithm developed assures a semantically rich and structurally correct floor plan at any point in the design process. In particular, the floor plan constructed through the design process contains spatial information as well as other design information about the building components. Thus, the system effectively manages spatial design information in the real-time basis. Since the system implemented on the basis of the algorithm is the very first step toward a complete intelligent CAD system, research and development issues to be considered next are identified at the end of the paper.