Calculating Occupancy in Revit, Automatically

 

On the latest episode of BIM After Dark Live I was joined by Dana De Filippi to talk about automatically calculating (and tagging) occupancy loads in Revit.  Dana is a co-host on the BIM Thoughts Podcast and a BIM technologist within the field of architecture and kicks all kinds of Dynamo butt.

Dana shared the workflow she developed that will automatically (and accurately) calculate your occupancy loads and place them into tags for you!  Something I know you all just love doing manually ... ;)

Topics Covered:

- Creating and using Area Schemes in Revit

- Constructing key values and using conditional formatting in Revit schedules.

- Use Dynamo to collect Revit and Excel Data

- Discover how to integrate user selection of different code requirements.

This is a DO NOT MISS for all of my fellow Architects out there (and FP engineers, too!)...

Continue reading to view the episode and download the sample files Dana was so gracious to share!

Revit Tip - Occupancy Loads / Room Capacity Scheduling and Calculations

An interesting issue that I worked through at the office today...  Thought I would share.

Basically, the issue is in the math.  When calculating the occupancy load using the schedule we had a parameter already in the schedule that divided the Room Area (based on the Revit Model) and the SF Per Person (A fixed number manually typed in based on certain factors).  This would then yield the Room Capacity.  Because we cannot have 1.75 of a person this number is usually rounded.  First, to round the number I used a Field Format override of (0 decimal places).  This rounds the number found up (if over 0.5) and down (if under 0.5).

This worked great but now we have an issue of rooms with a Room Capacity calculated at 0.35…  This will round down to 0 in our schedule.  Some of these rooms will need a Room Capacity of 1 as a minimum.  I solved this with an IF statement.  First, I had to create 2 parameters… One is called Room Capacity Multiplier (which is the quotient of Room Area divided by SF Per Person) and becomes a hidden field.  I then created a new “Calculate Value” parameter called “Room Capacity” (which will be the final number).  The IF statement looked like this:

if(Room Capacity Multiplier < 0.5, 1, Room Capacity Multiplier)

Based on the If Statement formula :  If(<condition>, <result-if-True>, <result-if-False>)

And that is it… Now if the number is less than 0.5 is will now show as 1 instead of 0 on the schedule.

Now, if we could only get the darn plan Symbol for room capacity to link with this schedule.

Please, share you experience, ideas, and solutions to using Revit for these types of Load Calcs, Fixture coutns, etc...  Comment below.

 ** Edit ** There is now an Add-in for Revit that handles Occupant Loads and Tags... I teamed up with another awesome Revit blogger to create SAuBIM - Code Calculations for Revit...