Construction projects are often delivered over time and over budget. Deviations are often identified only during the finishing stages when improvement actions to recover from delays become limited. Building Information Modeling (BIM) will transform the construction industry to come in line with more digitally developed industries like manufacturing. However, up to now, BIM has been mainly used to support the information flow of the construction design process and limited effort has been invested to investigate how it could support the management of the construction execution process. The paper shows how BIM can be used to schedule and monitor non-repetitive construction tasks. The proposed approach shows how important information needed for scheduling (like the number of pieces to be installed in a certain location) could be extracted from the BIM model. Moreover, it shows how BIM could support a quantitative monitoring of the reached progress and how this information can be displayed in an intuitive way to the user. The approach was developed during the project COCkPiT (Collaborative Construction Process Management) and especially by collaborating with a Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) company using as a case study a medium sized hospital construction project located in Northern Italy.
The research project »COCkPiT« -Collaborative Construction Process Managementaims at developing methodologies and tools to enhance time and budget control in construction projects, with a focus on small and medium-sized companies. The hypothesis is that the interplay of the three main phases of project management -planning, scheduling, and monitoring -can be improved by collecting highly detailed information early on in each phase, and making it available to the other phases at a high frequency. COCkPiT builds upon previous experiences in façade installation, where significant time and cost savings have been obtained by applying a normalized workload approach based on a collaborative process planning routine, an approach which is currently hardly supported by commercial project management tools. Thus, the objective of COCkPiT is to develop a methodology that supports i) collaborative process modelling as a basis for ii) a short-term rolling wave planning considering iii) real-time measurement of the progress on-site, to create highly reliable schedules and accurate forecasts. The focus of this paper is to present the conceptual fundamentals of integrating the modules of modelling, scheduling and monitoring, as well as involving the lean construction community to current considerations regarding the implementation in a self-containing IT-solution.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.