Adjacency in hospital planning

Adjacencies stand at the beginning of a multitude of planning tasks. Especially in hospital planning they are essential for describing relationships between different organizational units – e.g. ‘close’, ‘distant’ or ‘neutral’. Mathematically, these terms map to relative weights between each pair of units in the range [-1, 1] which are put into a (symmetric) adjacency matrix. This matrix subsequently determines relative locations of individual spaces (preliminary space layout). The paper deals with the effective definition of this adjacency matrix in the context of early-stage architectural planning. In contrast to current planning practice, which looks at each adjacency relation in isolation, our approach uses a Newtonian gravitation model to propagate changes to a single relationship immediately to the whole space layout. As a result, we are able to supply architects with a design tool that accelerates the definition of adjacencies and lets them preview the preliminary space layout at the same time.