Using Building Topological Information to Check for Means of Egress Building Code Compliance

Means of egress code requirements are intended to provide provisions for design, construction and layout of building elements in order to provide a continuous and unobstructed path of travel from any point in a building or structure to a public way. Although research into automating building code compliance (i.e. for means of egress code requirements) is extensive, the question of how to efficiently represent and extract building data remains open, especially with the continuous development of new building models such as the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes). This paper presents an automated technique that allows for compliance checks to be carried out directly from CAD drawings with a solid B-representation of the building’s spaces. An algorithm to extract topological relationships between the building spaces is developed. This information is used to automatically generate a means of egress code compliance diagrams (MECC) for the building. Additionally, a prototype computer tool, MEC is developed to automatically generate and check means of egress code issues.