A NEW ALGORITHMIC SPACE ANALYSIS AND PLANNING TOOL

Workplace Futures Group (WFG) and Gebler Tooth Associates (GTA) announce that they have been awarded funding by Innovate UK to assist with the development of a sophisticated software tool for office space planning and analysis.

The project, provisionally titled OPERA (Occupancy Planning and Environmental Risk Analysis), is being designed to help occupiers and providers of office space to carry out the rapid generation and assessment of very large numbers of possible layouts against a range of occupational standards.

The two companies have collaborated on previous projects over many years and are ideal partners in this venture.  Leading architectural practice GTA brings state-of-the-art expertise in writing code for the algorithmic generation of site plans, whilst WFG has thirty years’ experience in the design of office space and a database of many thousands of past projects.

The OPERA software employs some of the principles of AI by using rulesets derived from WFG’s data to drive algorithms that can then generate tens of thousands of space plans in seconds.  The system characterises different layout strategies and scores them against user-defined criteria, highlighting the most promising options.  Not only does this result in the rapid optimisation of space plans, but it also allows designers to experiment with varying approaches, unencumbered by the need to draw them all.

As companies begin to consider what the future of their offices will be, the ability to run the options with a click of the mouse will be invaluable.