COMPUTING WATERTIGHT VOLUMETRIC MODELS FROM BOUNDARY REPRESENTATIONS TO ENSURE CONSISTENT TOPOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

Abstract

To simulate environmental processes, noise, flooding in cities as well as the behaviour of buildings and infrastructure, ‘watertight’ volumetric models are a measuring prerequisite. They ensure topologically consistent 3D models and allow the definition of proper topological operations. However, in many existing city or other geo-information models, topologically unchecked boundary representations are used to store spatial entities. In order to obtain consistent topological models, including their ‘fillings’, in this paper, a triangulation combined with overlay and path-finding methods is presented by climbing up the dimension, beginning with the wireframe model. The algorithms developed for this task are presented, whereby using the philosophy of graph databases and the Property Graph Model. Examples to illustrate the algorithms are given, and experiments are performed on a data-set from Erfurt, Thuringia (Germany), providing complex geometries of buildings. The heavy influence of double precision arithmetic on the results, in particular the positional and angular precision, is discussed in the end.