Last month, we had one of the biggest projects that I have personally worked on.
The scale was massive, and hence, the number of devices was enormous. If parametric/automation design was not an option, it would surely be a nightmare.
In the past, I had developed a code that would help engineers specify the wiring path for fire alarm devices, that basically included both, manual and automated efforts to save time.
But in this project, this was no longer applicable, the scale required full automation to deliver on time.
What to do? The first idea I had was to go back to math!
I knew that there would be a mathematical solution to my problem, and my research led me to the Traveling Salesman Problem. A fascinating mathematical problem that was solved and even translated into python code.
Thankfully, Dynamo in Revit enables the use of Python, so I used the traveling salesman algorithm to define the optimum path for wiring the devices for each floor automatically.
In 5 mins, thousands of devices were automatically wired with a click.
Be thankful to salesmen, they help advance our math and coding skills.
Peace,
Edmond