Floor Plan Generation as an Optimization problem

Abstract

Floor-plan generation is the process of generating room layouts that represent potential house or building floor-plans. The generation of floor-plans is a topic that has many publications. Although some papers were designed to assist an architect in its work, no architectural software currently incorporate procedural techniques in their workflow. We propose a method that assists architects during the early design stages of a residential project, by generating a diverse set of floor-plans based on the basic requirements of the residence. Our method uses a plot area and some basic information about the number of rooms and their connections. These input requirements are then used by a Simulated annealing (SA) algorithm to explore many possibilities and present them to the architect. Our method is simple with only three move-types, which makes it easy to incorporate and further adjust to a project’s needs. By using SA we allow the plot area to be fully explored, giving us good diversity but with the drawbacks of being relatively slow and slightly reducing the resulting quality.