Most of Italy’s residential building stock predates contemporary structural safety and energy efficiency regulatory frameworks. Today, policymakers face the challenge of choosing whether to prioritise renovation or opt for demolition and reconstruction; both options carry significant socio-economic and environmental consequences and require extensive knowledge of the built heritage. However, detailed architecture-specific data remain scarce, as existing databases lack granular information. Moreover, traditional urbanlevel knowledge mapping approaches may be resource-intensive. To address this data gap, this study proposes a semi-automated methodology for generating graph-based digital models representing residential building floor plans. Using graph theory, floor spatial layouts are mapped into connectivity graphs and transformed into topological models. These models are enriched with functional data about spaces by assigning conditional topological rules based on node centrality metrics. The method was tested on 98 buildings in Bologna, Italy, yielding an 89.8% success rate and demonstrating its effectiveness in datalimited contexts.
| Authors | Massafra, Angelo and Al-Harasis, Dania H. and Stefanini, Lorenzo and Jabi, Wassim |
|---|---|
| Year | 2025 |
| Venue | Buildings (2075-5309) |
| DOI | 10.3390/buildings15081283 |
| Source Database | EBSCO (Applied Science & Technology) |
| Bridge-to-GNN | Category B |
| GNN Architecture | Graph GAN (heuristic — verify) |
| Graph Encoding | Not yet extracted from PDF |
| AEC Task | Not yet extracted from PDF |
| Cohort | Mature Applications (2024–2026) |
| Dataset Size | 3147 nodes; 98 buildings (heuristic — verify) |
|---|---|
| Implementation Framework | NetworkX, Topologic, Grasshopper / Rhino (heuristic — verify) |
| Primary Metric | Accuracy (heuristic — verify) |
| Key Finding | methodology for the semi-automated analysis of residential building floor plan layouts (heuristic — verify) |
| Quality Assessment | 3/6 · rigor: Medium · Code/Data: ✓Benchmark: ✓Baseline: ✓ (heuristic — verify) |
| GNN architectures detected | Graph GAN · Knowledge Graph Embedding (TransE/RotatE/DistMult) |
|---|---|
| Frameworks / libraries | NetworkX · Topologic / Topologicpy · Grasshopper / Rhino |
| Benchmark datasets referenced | PubMed · RPLAN |
| Code repositories found in text | https://zenodo.org/records/11555173 |
| Dataset stats found | 98 buildings · 25 buildings · 1000 trees · 3147 nodes |
| Quality (heuristic, 6-flag) | 2/6 · rigor: Low Code/Data: ✓Benchmark: ✓Baseline: —CV/Split: —Ablation: —Reproducible: — |
Part of the GML/GNN in AEC Systematic Review (PRISMA 2020) — 112 papers, 2020–2026