Abstract
M.Sc. (Computer Science)
This dissertation presents a method for learning from existing building designs and generating new building layouts. Generating fully furnished building layouts could be very useful for video games or for assisting architects when designing new buildings. The core concern is to drastically reduce the workload required to design building layouts.
The implemented prototype features a Computer Aided Design system, named CABuilD that allows users to design fully furnished multi-storey building layouts. Building layouts designed using CABuilD can be taught to an Artificial Immune System. The Artificial Immune System tracks information such as building layouts, room sizes and furniture layouts. Once building layouts has been taught to the artificial immune system, a generation algorithm can utilise the information in order to generate fully furnished building layouts. The generation algorithm that is presented allows fully furnished buildings to be generated from high-level information such as the number of rooms to include and a building perimeter.
The presented algorithm differs from existing building generation methods in the following ways: Firstly existing methods either ignore building perimeters or assume a buildings perimeter is a rectangle. The presented method allows the user to specify a closed polygon as a building perimeter which will guide the generation of the building layout. Secondly existing generation methods tend to run from a set of rules. The implemented system learns from existing building layouts, effectively allowing it to generate different building types based on the building layouts that were taught to the system. Thirdly, the system generates both the building layout as well as the furniture within rooms. Existing systems only generate the building layout or the furniture, but not both.
The prototype that was implemented as a proof of concept uses a number of biologically inspired techniques such as Ant algorithms, Particle Swarm Optimisation and Artificial Immune Systems. The system also employs multiple intelligent agents in order to furnished rooms. The prototype is capable of generating furnished building layouts in merely a few seconds, much faster than a human could design such a layout. Possible improvements and future work is presented at the end of the dissertation.