BIM-based Automated Planning for Panelized Construction in the Light-Frame Building Industry

Abstract

Building information modelling (BIM) has been recognized as an information technology with the potential to profoundly change the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry, and has drawn attention from numerous scholars within the construction domain. Despite the reported advancements pertaining to BIM in previous studies, the use of BIM in planning panelized construction (e.g., construction-centric design detailing, construction-oriented quantity take-off, and detailed construction scheduling) has not yet reached its full potential. Discipline-specific BIM design models from architects and structural engineers are insufficient to serve the needs of the construction field. This research thus explores the extended use of BIM to facilitate automated planning for panelized construction. In terms of construction-centric design detailing, this research exploits a BIM-rule-based automated approach to designing and modelling drywall and sheathing layouts with minimized material waste in order to promote building panel production. In the proposed approach, object-based computer-processable layout design rules are comprehensively formalized based on trade know-how and construction best practice, and integrated with mathematical algorithms in order to generate the optimized boarding layout design with minimized material waste. For construction-oriented quantity take-off, this research proposes an ontology-based semantic approach to extracting construction-oriented quantity take-off information from a BIM design model. This approach allows users to semantically query the BIM design model using domain vocabularies, capitalizing on building product ontology formalized from construction perspectives. As such, quantity take-off information relevant to construction practitioners can be readily extracted and visualized in 3D in order to serve application needs in the construction field. Lastly, this research presents a BIM-based integrated scheduling approach that facilitates the automatic generation of optimized component-centric activity-level construction schedules for panelized building projects under spatial and resource constraints, by achieving an in-depth integration of BIM product models with work package information, process simulations, and optimization algorithms. This research prototypes an automated planning system for panelized building construction as add-on tools of Autodesk Revit. Three case studies are presented to demonstrate the proposed methodology. Building on the existing body of knowledge in this field, the key contribution of the present research is that it defines three practical problems in a scientific manner and introduces three novel approaches in order to adapt BIM design models for construction practitioners and to advance the current planning practice in panelized construction by integrating construction-oriented intelligence into BIM.