Exit Access Travel Distance

Revit
1

Hi Everyone. New here. New to Dynamo. I work with large warehouses that utilize a significant amount of material handling equipment (conveyors) and platforms. I understand that Dynamo has the ability to calculate the egress travel distance from any point on a platform to the nearest exit door down on the ground floor. I would just have to provide the correct nodes(?) for the different levels and doors (I think). Is there a good reference that people use to help write these scripts? Is there a place to purchase a generic script that I could modify?

2

Welcome to the forum, and welcome to Dynamo! :wave:

For what you’re describing (travel distance through a space, around obstacles, across levels), the tool I’d point you at is VASA (Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis). It’s a free package on the Dynamo Package Manager, and it has a pathfinding component that’s basically built for this. It voxelizes your building or site and finds walkable paths around equipment and up and down stairs, then reports the distance. That gets you much closer to real egress travel distance than measuring straight lines by hand.

A few links to get you going:

  • What it is and how it works: Introducing VASA
  • Get it: search VASA in the Dynamo Package Manager (Packages > Search for a Package). It’s free.
  • A pathfinding sample to open and modify (answers your “generic script I can tweak” question): VASA pathfinding example + sample model. There’s a VASA-Pathfinding-in-2D.dyn and a sample .rvt attached.

Since you’re new to Dynamo, I’d start by getting that sample graph running against the sample model, then swap in your own geometry: platforms as start points, conveyors and equipment as obstacles, exit doors as targets. The multi-level part (platform down to a ground-floor door) is exactly where voxel pathfinding earns its keep over a flat 2D measurement.

Also worth tagging @jacob.small, who has experimented with VASA quite a bit and can likely steer you around the common gotchas.

3

So before I weigh in… Do you really want to identify the path from a point, or do you want to identify the portions of a plan which are too far from an egress point?

Asking as they are two similar graphs in concept, but the process for building them is different enough that building thing A doesn’t necessarily help you get thing B.