ITcon Vol. 10, pg. 219-227, http://www.itcon.org/2005/15

USING BUILDING TOPOLOGICAL INFORMATION TO CHECK FOR MEANS OF EGRESS BUILDING CODE COMPLIANCE

submitted:September 2004
revised:February 2005
published:September 2005
editor(s):Anumba C
authors:Khaled Nassar
University of Maryland Eastern Shore, USA
email: knassar@umes.edu

Tang-Hung Nguyen
North Dakota State University, USA
email: tang.neyuen @ndsu.nodak.edu
summary:Means of egress code requirements are intended to provide provisions for design, construction and layout of building elements in order to provide a continuous and unobstructed path of travel from any point in a building or structure to a public way. Although research into automating building code compliance (i.e. for means of egress code requirements) is extensive, the question of how to efficiently represent and extract building data remains open, especially with the continuous development of new building models such as the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes). This paper presents an automated technique that allows for compliance checks to be carried out directly from CAD drawings with a solid B-representation of the building’s spaces. An algorithm to extract topological relationships between the building spaces is developed. This information is used to automatically generate a means of egress code compliance diagrams (MECC) for the building. Additionally, a prototype computer tool, MEC2 is developed to automatically generate and check means of egress code issues.
keywords:emergency exit, building code, topological information, automated deduction, computer-aided building design.
full text: (PDF file, 0.261 MB)
citation:Nassar K and Nguyen T-H (2005). USING BUILDING TOPOLOGICAL INFORMATION TO CHECK FOR MEANS OF EGRESS BUILDING CODE COMPLIANCE, ITcon Vol. 10, pg. 219-227, https://www.itcon.org/2005/15