This is a trick I made for documentation of egress paths and checking egress travel distances in life safety plan.
How It Works
By clicking a number of points on floor plan, I can create the egress path with the egress travel distance automatically measured. Tagging the path with a generic model tag will report out the total egress travel distance. If the egress travel distance exceeds the maximum travel distance (by code and set up by user), a fire symbol will pop up to alert me that the plan doesn’t work.
Construction
This is a generic model adaptive component family. An adapative component allows you to free hand draw a series of lines by clicking to locate points at several locations. In this case it is a 12 point adaptive component which allows drawing 11 segment path.
12 points were created at arbitrary locations and made adaptive. Every two adjacent points were dimensioned and made reporting parameters (L1, L2, L3…).
A parameter “Egress Travel Distance” was created to total all reporting parameter (L1, L2, L3…). The starting dot and the ending arrow are 1 point adaptive components adapting to the starting point and the end point. The Building Code has the maximum travel distance defined. A type parameter ” Max Travel Distance” was created, it was made as type for different jurisdiction having different requirement. The fire symbol is another 1 point adaptive component. The fire symbol was placed and its visibility was controlled by a parameter “Alert”. The “Alert” parameter was related to the “Egress Travel Distance” and “Max Travel Distance” with this formula: Egress Travel Distance > Max Travel Distance
Similarly I can create a number of these egress path families (2 points, 3 points, 4 points …) for paths with different number of segments.
Sean Burke (Paradigm Shift) has create a video on his blog to show how my family works on life safety plan. Thanks Sean.
