Smartplan AI

First of its kind fully automated web-based SaaS for office space planning built using Vue (Nuxt), Python, AWS S3 and DynamoDB. Built for the real estate leasing market, Smartplan can automatically and in real time generate office layouts for specific floor plans based on user input program requirements.

Click here to sign up for a free account and try it for yourself: https://smartplanai.app/

User experience

Using the app, the user is able to generate unique layouts for any input floor plan using a catalog of predefined space and furniture types.

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  1. Starting from scratch or from an uploaded floor plan, the user can sketch their floor plan layout including walls, cores, existing entries, columns, and mullions.

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  1. Once the design is confirmed, the user can configure their space using the Program Calculator in the Left Panel.

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  1. Once the program is configured, the user can click the 'Generate' button which sends the floor plan layout and program configuration to the Generator Service, which generates a design, saves it to S3, and responds with a signed URL that is used to load the Design into the UI. Once generated and retrieved, the design is drawn in the browser using a custom implementation of the Paper.js library.

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  1. In the plan view, the user can hover over the generated programs to reveal details about the assigned program as well as modify the program assignments to further fine tune the generated plan layouts.

Architecture

The app consists of two primary components:

  1. A webapp built using Vue3 + Nuxt with a backend composed of AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3 services and deployed on Netlify
  2. A custom Generator web service and geometry kernel built using Python and deployed on Heroku

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Webapp

The web-app is comprised of a single repository consisting of:

  • A Front End layer built using JavaScript/TypeScript, Vue3, Nuxt3, Pinia, Paper.js, Tailwind
  • A Back End layer built using AWS services Lambda, Cognito, DynamoDB, S3
  • The app is deployed using Netlify which also manages user auth through its Identity service

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Generator service

Python API built with Flask and library of custom Classes including:

  • Custom 2D geometry kernel built specifically for floor plans including custom representations of Polyline and Polygon geometries used for representing and computing the floor plans
  • Rule-based algorithms for generating floor plan layouts using a pre-defined library of programs based on input floor plan layout and program requirement
  • Optimization engine to evaluate a range of layout options and select the most efficient

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Catalog

The key to Smartplan's ability to automatically generate efficient floor plan designs for any office is a Catalog of predefined space and furniture types. The Catalog includes building blocks for spaces of various sizes including furniture layouts for any of our predefined space types that fit within that particular size space. Blocks include common program elements like desks, cubicles, offices, conference rooms, etc. This kit-of-parts approach ensures all generated spaces are compliant to code and other minimal standards. Our data-driven approach also ties each element in the layout to a real furniture item which ensures data fidelity across 2d and 3d layouts.

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