Messi, Leonardo (2022) Development of a BIM-based simulator for workspace management in construction. PhD thesis, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy.
Abstract
In the AEC industry, construction sites are very dynamic operating environments. Activities' workspace demand continuously changes across space and time, stressing the need to consider the space as a limited and renewable resource. This issue has not been fully handled yet, neither by traditional scheduling techniques nor by more advanced 4D tools. For these reasons, construction management teams usually carry out spatial considerations manually based on 2D sketches. This approach, especially in big construction projects, is highly time-demanding and error-prone causing, as demonstrated by statistics, injuries, and productivity slowdown. To cover these gaps, this study proposes a workspace management framework that integrates the work scheduling phase with spatial analysis, carried out by a spatial conflict simulator developed using a serious game engine. The simulator, given the BIM model and the construction work schedule, can detect eventual spatial interferences based on geometric computations and physics simulations. The detected conflicts are then judged applying Bayesian inference to filter non-critical scenarios and avoid overestimation. Afterwards, the construction management team, made aware of likely future spatial issues, can adjust or confirm the work schedule. This approach can provide a valuable contribution in detecting spatial conflicts during both the construction planning phase and works execution. In this study, the proposed spatial conflict simulator has been validated on the planning phase of a real use case, demonstrating its capability to not only detect an increased number of spatial issues, compared to the state-of-the-art tools, but also to estimate related criticality levels and avoid overestimations. In the future, the proposed approach, adapted with minor changes, can be applied at runtime for proactively refining the work schedule during works execution.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Naticchia, Berardo and Carbonari, Alessandro |
| Index terms: | construction work, construction planning, estimate, statistics, productivity, workspace, computation, state of the art, game engine, construction project, scheduling, injury, construction site |
| Subjects: | health conditions and diseases, management, software systems, work location, construction planning, financial and cost management, computational methods, mathematical modelling, production management, operations research, operations management, research dissemination and communication |
| Topics: | Health and Safety, Project Management, Site Management, Time Control, Digital Applications, Stakeholder Management, Business Strategy, Cost Management, Research Practice |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here