SKETCH-TO-BIM: ENHANCING THE DYNAMO BASED AUTOMATED TRUSS DESIGN OPTIMIZATION WORKFLOW

Although digital technologies have enhanced structural designers' capabilities for optimal designs, reliance on manual workflows still poses obstacles in modeling, analysis, and optimization.This raises the question of feasibility for a combined framework, focusing on an adaptive, automated workflow to transform hand-sketched truss designs into optimized structural models in a Visual Programming (VP) environment while employing Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools.Thus, the research unfolds: (i) training a deep-learning model for feature extraction; (ii) developing a sketch application to connect Dynamo to any touchscreen device to streamline the draft generation process; (iii) converting optimized sketches from Dynamo to validated structural models in Robot Structural Analysis (RSA); (iv) validating the proposed method with a benchmark problem sourced from the open literature.Results of this unified Sketch-to-BIM workflow demonstrate valuable improvements in design accuracy, weight reduction, and structural performance, along with significant time savings as the entire cycle completes in approximately 13 minutes, reducing the duration of typical manual workflows by an order of magnitude.