Methods for Creating Indoor GIS Floor Plans

Managing building floor plan data is a complex task for many organizations. Facilities frequently rely on multiple information sources across various formats, which often leads to outdated and unreliable data. This is a widespread industry challenge.

By migrating building floor plans into the Indoor GIS format, facility managers can turn their facility data into a robust spatial database, where floor plans are no longer static drawings; they become an accessible, searchable foundation for managing their entire organization's spaces.

Why migrate your floor plans to Indoor GIS?

Moving from static building plans to interactive maps empowers organizations by centralizing their authoritative facility information portfolio and making it accessible across the organization.

Facility management involves multiple departments from maintenance and operations to safety and security, emergency response, engineering, energy and utilities, planning, space management, event coordination, and public relations. Indoor GIS can empower each of these departments to streamline their use of building information and make their processes more efficient, saving time and money across the organization. This cross-departmental utility can offset the cost and time invested in implementing Indoor GIS, typically paying for itself within the first few years.

Top 10 reasons why organizations implement Indoor GIS:

1. Move away from static drawings into interactive “floor-aware” maps and 3D scenes

2. Centralize facility information into a single, authoritative, standardized geodatabase accessible to the whole organization

3. Transform isolated building information into a dynamic, searchable resource.

4. Map building assets and equipment to support work order management and efficiently direct maintenance crews to specific locations

5. Provide a mobile workflow for updating building information in the field.

6. Connect floor plans to real-time operational data to monitor space use, occupancy, and asset condition

7. Enhance safety and security by quickly sharing floor plans and critical incident asset locations with first responders (exits, utility shut-offs, life-saving equipment, evacuation routes)

8. Provide public wayfinding and navigation to enhance staff and visitor experience

9. Support planning and design with authoritative existing facility data

10. Empower your organization to analyze spatial relationships, optimize floor space, locate spaces, people, and assets, and visualize patterns

The Challenge: Facility Data is not Uniform

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) data support planning and construction, whereas GIS enables locating and analyzing. This fundamental difference poses a significant challenge: visually accurate information often lacks the necessary attributes and standardization to be easily imported into a geodatabase. Furthermore, facility data typically exists in siloed formats and software, having been created by multiple architects and vendors over the years to varying standards, or to no standards at all. The original as-built layouts may no longer match reality and require field verification. CAD and BIM data are also typically not georeferenced, requiring manual scaling and rectification to align floor plans with real-world coordinates. Multiple feature types per CAD layer, multi-line text annotations, block symbols, multiple levels per page, side profile elevations, and drawing marginalia are the most common characteristics of CAD and BIM data that pose challenges for conversion to GIS format.

To create indoor GIS floor plans, the goal is to consolidate building floor plan data from disparate sources into the ArcGIS Indoors Information Model, ensuring building footprints, levels, spaces, and assets are defined accurately and uniquely in a standardized format.

Depending on the type of source data, there are various ways to migrate it.

1. Building Scanning

   
   

If your existing floor plan files are outdated, unverified, or unavailable, building scanning is the solution. Handheld SLAM LiDAR equipment (such as the GeoSLAM Horizon, FARO Orbis, Leica BLK2GO, NavVis VLX, or MLX) can scan a 100,000-square-foot building in three to four hours.

These systems work by emitting rapid laser pulses and measuring how long they take to reflect, thereby calculating precise distances to create a highly accurate 3D point cloud of the surroundings.

GIS technicians can generate up-to-date floor plans from point clouds by extracting walls, doors, openings, windows, and stairways as 2D line features, which can be directly imported into the ArcGIS Indoors data model.

Screenshot: SLAM LiDAR 3D point clouds. SLAM LiDAR is a mapping system that pairs a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor with SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithms to create 3D maps of unknown environments in real time without the need for GPS.

The scanning equipment continually takes 360-degree photos as it moves through the building. These panoramic images can be brought into indoor maps as oriented imagery layers, allowing users to explore the building interior in a similar way to Google Street View. These georeferenced images are particularly useful for first responders visualizing access points and critical incident assets, or for showing maintenance crews or building staff the exact space they’ll be working in before they go on-site.

2. CAD to GIS Conversion

   
   

ArcGIS Indoors comes with several geoprocessing tools that automate converting from Autodesk DWG or MicroStation DGN to the ArcGIS Indoors format.

Option 1: Import Floorplans to the Indoors Geodatabase: This is the original ArcGIS Indoors data-loading tool. It takes in .dwg or .dgn files and requires a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx). This spreadsheet acts as a configuration template to map CAD layers (like “GROSS_AREA”, "A-WALL", or "A-DOOR") to the correct ArcGIS Indoors feature classes. The spreadsheet contains the path to multiple building-level CAD files.

Option 2: Import CAD to Indoor Dataset: This is a newer, more streamlined tool that also accepts .dwg and .dgn files but lets you map the layers directly within the geoprocessing tool's interface, eliminating the need for the Excel spreadsheet. This tool is useful for loading or updating individual building levels, but it can also run in batch to load multiple levels.

Option 3: Floor Plan Editor Application: The Floor Plan Editor is a web application template that comes with the ArcGIS Indoors Spaces add-on product license. It allows CAD files to be uploaded directly to the browser and mapped to Indoor GIS feature classes without requiring desktop GIS software. It also allows CAD files to be georeferenced directly in the app. The Floor Plan Editor allows non-GIS professionals to maintain and update floor plan information, make changes to building configurations, add furniture, doors, and partitions, merge and reclassify spaces, all within a versioned scenario plan, without affecting the authoritative indoor GIS data. Once version changes are approved, the user can manually push the updates to the authoritative plan.

Floor Plan Editor Application - Available with ArcGIS Indoors Spaces

Option 4: ArcGIS Data Interoperability Extension

The Data Interoperability Extension for ArcGIS Pro is a powerful tool for designing automated CAD-to-GIS workflows. The extension provides access to FME Workbench software, which is ideally suited for this task. If you have a large number of CAD files with regular updates that need to be pushed to the GIS database, FME can greatly streamline and automate this process, reducing manual steps and improving CAD data quality control and error logging. FME supports geometry validation and repair during conversion and enables automated CAD data cleanup, feature generalization, and simplification. It also allows extraction of data properties from AutoCAD Extended data lists (XDATA), allowing space properties such as room number, room type, and square footage to be read from the data properties rather than from text annotations.

3. BIM to GIS Conversion

BIM models created in Autodesk Revit or Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) files make it even easier to import building levels into ArcGIS Indoors, allowing entire buildings to be imported at once rather than level by level. Use the Import BIM to Indoor Dataset tool provided in the ArcGIS Indoors toolbox.

Importing BIM models to ArcGIS Indoors

4. PDF to GIS Conversion

If the only available digital floor plans are in PDF format, this information can be migrated into ArcGIS Indoors by georeferencing the plans using the best available aerial imagery, alignment with verified GIS data, or survey control points (if available). Manual heads-up digitizing is typically required to create vector linework for rooms and spaces; however, in ArcGIS Pro 3.6, Esri has released the Extract Floor Plan Features From PDF tool, which extracts polyline features from a PDF floor plan and optionally extracts text features as points. Once this tool has run, use the Import Features To Indoor Dataset tool to bring those features into ArcGIS Indoors.

ArcGIS Indoor Viewer Application - Explore your entire campus floor plans in a single app.

Summary

Implementing Indoor GIS for an organization can support multiple departments and activities, from safety and security planning and response, maintenance operations, asset management, construction planning and design, space management and optimization, to public wayfinding and navigation.

There are multiple ways to consolidate facility data into a centralized, accessible GIS database. Wherever an organization is on this journey, Cloudpoint is a trusted and experienced ArcGIS Indoors specialty partner ready to provide support at every step of your indoor mapping journey!

For more information or to schedule a FREE Indoor GIS readiness consultation, contact us here.