Automating Computational Design with Generative AI

TL;DR

This paper evaluates and enhances AI diffusion models for generating valid civil engineering floor plans, significantly improving their accuracy and proposing future research directions in building information modeling.

Contribution

It introduces novel refinement methods to improve the validity of AI-generated floor plans and evaluates their effectiveness in civil engineering applications.

Findings

Validity of generated plans increased from 6% to 90%.

Proposed refinement approaches significantly enhance semantic accuracy.

Provides future research directions for AI in civil engineering.

Abstract

AI image generators based on diffusion models have recently garnered attention for their capability to create images from simple text prompts. However, for practical use in civil engineering they need to be able to create specific construction plans for given constraints. This paper investigates the potential of current AI generators in addressing such challenges, specifically for the creation of simple floor plans. We explain how the underlying diffusion-models work and propose novel refinement approaches to improve semantic encoding and generation quality. In several experiments we show that we can improve validity of generated floor plans from 6% to 90%. Based on these results we derive future research challenges considering building information modelling. With this we provide: (i) evaluation of current generative AIs; (ii) propose improved refinement approaches; (iii) evaluate them on various examples; (iv) derive future directions for diffusion models in civil engineering.