BIM Project2_Nursing Unit Layout Evaluation

BACKGROUND
This project is related to my final thesis which is low-cost Shanghai general hospital. The project design focus on inpatient department design, because the balance between quantity and quality of inpatient units is a major challenge in this era of rapid population growth. According to related research on relative costs of building the various departments within the hospital building, inpatient nursing units represent the single largest components of the hospital cost (35-39%). (Ahmed H.Sherif) Efficient inpatient units design is crucial to cost control of the whole project.

The efficiency of the layout is the major factor of inpatient unit efficiency. It includes the average travel distance from nursing station to patient rooms, the  proportion of  NSF of patient rooms to the total square footage of the inpatient unit, length/width ratio, number of patient rooms in an inpatient unit.

INTRODUCTION

The BIM API model is a preliminary model of the inpatient unit  of my final project. I select the most relevant factors as parameter of my BIM model.  I use BIM API to retriever and caculate these data. According to a paper researching efficiency of general hospital, I weigh these data and finally generate a score for a certain type layout of inpatient unit.

This very basic inpatient unit model includes one nursing station and seven patient room. According to Chinese building code, all the patient rooms face toward either south or east.

When I run the API program, this form will show up. I made the interface semi-transparency so that it won't block the floor plan. The two numbers are weigh factor of travelling distance and patient room proportion. They are predefined in Command.cs.

Once click the button "show it" , the overall score will be shown in the textbox. After I slightly change the layout of the unit, you can see the score rises about ten points. The routes are automatically generated through a series of location points ( nursing station, opening of nursing station, door of a patient room and the patient room). I use splines to generate the routes because we cannot create curve in a Revit project. The way to create HermiteSpline is different with Curvebypoints.

In this case, there are only seven patient rooms in a inpatient unit compared to about 40 rooms in a real project. It will be a huge task if I calculate the length and room area separately.  Hence I use loop function to deal with collection of IDs.

Another challenge is to link form.cs to command.cs.   We need to make the parameter as public,   assign calculated value to it and create form using updated values.