Beyond CAD : Software Assisted Floor Plan Design for Architects

This thesis is a review of articles focusing on software assisted floor plan design for architecture. I group the articles into optimization, case based design, and machine learning, based on their use of prior examples. I then look into each category and further classify articles based on dimensions relevant to their overall approach. Case based design was a popular research field in the 1990s and early 2000s when several large research projects were conducted. However, since then the research has slowed down. Over the past 20 years, optimization methods to solve architectural floor plans have been researched extensively using a number of different algorithms and data models. The most popular approach is to use a stochastic optimization method such as a genetic algorithm or simulated annealing. More recently, a number of articles have investigated the possibility of using machine learning on architectural floor plans. The advent of neural networks and GAN models, in particular, has spurred a great deal of new research. Despite considerable research efforts, assisted floor plan design has not found its way into commercial applications. To aid industry adoption, more work is needed on the integration of computational design tools into the existing design workflows