Self-Organised Construction with Revit

Abstract

Due to innovations in software, robotics and 3D printing, self-organised construction is within reach. It bears great potential for the automatic generation of a wide variety of designs, their integration into the built environment, their structural and automatised optimisation, as well as their dynamic adaptation over long periods of time. In this paper, motivated by the latest empirical findings on the construction methods of social insects, we present a software pipeline for the generation of architectural designs based on self-organisation. A probabilistic, grid-based multi-agent system that implements a flexible stigmergy-based behavioural construction model generates three-dimensional structures. Next, the generated structures could be evaluated in terms of their energy efficiency and these results be fed into an optimisation engine to improve the local behaviours of the construction agents. For visualisation and evaluation of the generated designs we utilise the API of the framework Revit 2016, a software for Building Information Modelling (BIM) provided by Autodesk.