In the meantime, we’ve all rolled into 2017 now. So with that I would like to send you my best wishes for this New Year. And above all, I wish you even more Dynamo awesomeness in 2017! That being said, I want to kick off the Dynamo Year 2017 with this post.

When we think about “Fire Exit Risk Assessment” in an architectural BIM model, then we also think about the creation of “evacuation plans” for the building. In a lot of situations this is done manually based on estimations of the shortest and easiest way to reach an indicated “emergency exit”. I’ve tried to tackle this challenge by automating the definition of the shortest routes between a room exit and the nearest emergency exit. Of course, all of this is done with Autodesk Revit and Dynamo.

In this post I want to explain you how you can build this type of script yourself and as usual you’ll find the datasets at the bottom.

Situation

The model that is used is shown on the images below. The script needs to detect the shortest route between a “normal” room exit door and one of the 4 indicated “emergency exit” doors at ground level. Therefore a room plan at that level is created and the rooms that can be used as “circulation”, which are the corridors in this case, are indicated in orange.

Results

The result of the script is the creation of evacuation routes for each room exit to the nearest emergency exit. In Dynamo this looks as follows:

When using the Dynamo curves to create Revit detail lines from them, this results in nice evacuation plans like shown in images below.

How to create the script

Before you start experimenting with the Dynamo script, provided at the bottom of the post, I would strongly advise you to watch the detailed recording with voice-over, I have made available on my YouTube channel. It will explain you step by step how to read the Revit model, analyse the circulation area, defined the shortest routes and finally how to automate the creation of the detail lines in Revit, representing the evacuation paths.

Datasets