ARCH-Elites: Quality-Diversity for Urban Design

TL;DR

ARCH-Elites leverages a pre-trained surrogate model within a MAP-Elites framework to efficiently generate and evaluate large-scale urban layouts for real-world locations, advancing architectural generative design.

Contribution

This work introduces ARCH-Elites, a novel approach integrating surrogate models with MAP-Elites for scalable, real-time urban design optimization in real-world settings.

Findings

Successfully generated novel urban layouts for Boston locations

Demonstrated real-time performance evaluation capability

Showcased potential for scalable architectural design exploration

Abstract

This paper introduces ARCH-Elites, a MAP-Elites implementation that can reconfigure large-scale urban layouts at real-world locations via a pre-trained surrogate model instead of costly simulations. In a series of experiments, we generate novel urban designs for two real-world locations in Boston, Massachusetts. Combining the exploration of a possibility space with real-time performance evaluation creates a powerful new paradigm for architectural generative design that can extract and articulate design intelligence.