SAUCE – SpAcevehicle-bUilding Connectivity Evaluation: An Adjacent Matrix Based Digital Tool for Internal Connectivity Evaluation and Improvement in Spacevehicle-Buildings

Spacevehicle-building represents a peculiar design problem with many stringent requirements, including unusual surrounding conditions and severe cargo limitations. The latter is caused by the launch system capabilities and impacts on the internal room’s dimensional and mass characteristics. Therefore, one of the Spaceship’s design challenges consists of its internal room organisation considering the needs under holistic perspectives. In particular, it is crucial “how” internal rooms are related since their optimal use depends on well-defined connections.

SAUCE proposes an automatised tool that evaluates internal connections’ performance in Spacevehicle-Buildings by digitalising the Adjacency Matrix. This method is used in architectural design to represent the relationship between rooms while its digitalisation will bring the readability and execution by a machine. The proposed tool provides a computable and objective assessment of “how” the internal functions are related to each other, describing a Spacevehicle-Building internal organisation from spatial layout perspective. Implementation of this workflow include feeding the scoring system to a metaheuristic algorithm-based generative process to investigate optimal combinations between the functions, providing support to the design process.