Andrés Felipe Barco

A Recursive Algorithm for Building Renovation in Smart Cities

Layout configuration algorithms in civil engineering have two major strategies called constructive and iterative improvement. Both strategies have been successfully applied within different facility scenarios such as room configurations and apartment layouts. Yet, most of the work share two commonalities: They attack problems in which the reference plane is parallel to the Earth and, in most cases, the number of activities are known in advance. This work aims to close that gap by developing a constructive-based algorithm for the layout configuration of building facades in the context of a French project called CRIBA. The project develops a smart-city support system for high-performance renovation of apartment buildings. Algorithm details are explained and one example is presented to illustrate the kind of facades it can deal with.

Building renovation adopts mass customization: Configuring insulating envelopes

This work is motivated by an industrial need of manufacturing façades insulating envelopes in order to reduce energy consumption in residential buildings. An insulating envelope is a configuration of a set of rectangular panels that respects a set of limitations. Due to the number of façades to be renovated and the number of possible configurations for a single façade, the envelope configuration is both a mass customization problem as well as a combinatorial one. The paper then introduces a decision support system based on the framework of constraint satisfaction, as it fits neatly the constrained nature of the problem. Two configuration tasks have been identified as prerequisite to envelopes configurations: (1) the configuration of a questionnaire for information inputs and (2) the configuration of a constraint satisfaction problem for each one of the façades to be renovated. The system architecture promotes maintenance, modularity and efficiency as different configuration tasks are divided into web-services. Conception and implementation of the massive building thermal renovation are then supported.

Open Packing for Facade-Layout Synthesis Under a General Purpose Solver

Facade-layout synthesis occurs when renovating buildings to improve their thermal insulation and reduce the impact of heating on the environment. This interesting problem involves to cover a facade with a set of disjoint and configurable insulating panels. Therefore, it can be seen as a constrained rectangle packing problem, but for which the number of rectangles to be used and their size are not known a priori. This paper proposes an efficient way of solving this problem using constraint programming. The model is based on an open variant of the DiffN global constraint in order to deal with an unfixed number of rectangles, as well as a simple but efficient search procedure to solve this problem. An empirical evaluation shows the practical impact of every choice in the design of our model. A prototype implemented in the general purpose solver Choco is intended to assist architect decision-making in the context of building thermal retrofit.

Low Cost Intelligent System for the 2D Biomechanical Analysis of Road Cyclists

This paper introduces an intelligent system focused on the biomechanical analysis of road bicycle cyclists. This type of analysis is carried out in specialized medical centers that operate using costly resources and are employed, mainly, for studies on athletes of high performance. The proposed system contrasts with these centers in that it provides the rookie cyclist with an accessible and affordable biomechanical analysis, although not as accurate. The architecture of the system rests in the advances in motion capture and augmented reality libraries. In the paper are discussed the motivations of the research, the internal design of the proposed system and the differences with various systems.

Thermal estimations to support buildings retrofit: Which envelope to manufacture?

In order to reduce energetic consumption, buildings may be retrofitted by covering them with an insulation envelope composed of rectangular parameterizable panels. In such scenario different envelopes configurations are possible to cover the same building. Thus, a crucial aspect of the retrofit is to select, among potential solutions, those ones providing good thermal performance at reasonable cost. In this paper are discussed which characteristics are part of a panels-made envelope, how to compute their performance and associated cost, and a bicriteria function evaluating the envelope. We compute thermal and cost estimations with respect to the spatial positioning of panels configuring the layout. The aim of our contribution is to assist architects in their decision-making process. Conception and implementation of the thermal retrofit are then supported by our estimations.

Layout Synthesis for Symmetrical Facades

Facade-layout synthesis problem deals with the allocation of an undetermined number of rectangular parameterizable panels over a rectangular facade surface. Requirements state that panels must not overlap, must be placed in specific supporting areas and must cover existing windows and doors over the facade. Due to the constrained constitution of the problem, constraint satisfaction and constraint programming come naturally as solving techniques. However, as most constraint programming environments use as arguments a well-defined set of variables, speculation about the number of panels to be allocated becomes a critical issue for its automation. On this regard, we present a two-phase solution : First determine the structure of the layout-plan and second, pass to a constraint solver a fully declarative model using such structure. We show that our solutions are consistent over symmetrical facades, and thus, can be used for early stages of architectural design. Our goal is to assist architects with a constraint-based support system.

Building Thermal Renovation Overview

Facade-layout synthesis is a combinatorial problem that arises when insulating buildings with rectangular parameterizable panels. At the core of the problem lies the assignment of size to an unknown number of panels and their arrangement over a rectangular facade surface. The purpose of this communication is to give an overview of the facade-layout synthesis problem and its reasoning by constraint satisfaction problems. Then, we show the combinatorial characteristics of the problem, its modeling by means of constraint satisfaction and a decision support system that solves the problem using several constraint-based algorithms.