This book presents three projects that demonstrate the fundamental
problems of architectural design and urban composition - the layout
design, evaluation and optimization. Part I describes the functional
layout design of a residential building, and an evaluation of the
quality of a town square (plaza).
The algorithm for the functional layout design is based on backtracking
using a constraint satisfaction approach combined with coarse grid
discretization. The algorithm for the town square evaluation is based on
geometrical properties derived directly from its plan.
Part II introduces a crowd-simulation application for the analysis of
escape routes on floor plans, and optimization of a floor plan for
smooth crowd flow. The algorithms presented employ agent-based modeling
and cellular automata.