Pattern-driven mapping from architectural plans to solid models of buildings

For the aim of producing geometric models of critical infrastructures (e.g., governamental assets, nuclear plants, airports, railway and metro stations, hospitals, etc.) where various security tools and control systems may be easily integrated, we discuss here a fast and inexpensive construction of digital models of complex buildings and infrastructures from line drawings of architectural plans, the only geometric information widely available. The paradigmatic reference is to PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), where geometric information provides the exchange/collaboration layer among all business data and departments. Our algorithmic approach is centered on the generation of BSP (Binary Space Partition) models of buildings from architectural plans, through automatic translation into a symbolic intermediate geometric language, whereas detailed representations of whatever infrastructure portions are generated at run-time by a streaming data-flow process well-suited for implementation on the Cell BE architecture.