With the rise of Building Information Modeling (BIM), off-site construction is gaining momentum in the construction industry. This construction method can benefit the industry through improved productivity and reduced waste. However, it also poses new challenges to building designers and construction practitioners with respect to building design and construction planning. For example, when designing building products and BIM models, designers needs to consider manufacturing process constraints in order to harness the benefits of manufacturing technology. This is in part due to the fact that, in the offsite construction paradigm, building design must be transformed from product-focused to manufacturing process-driven. At present, considerable human involvement and off-site construction knowledge are required to adapt building design (e.g., panelize building objects) for manufacturing processes within BIM environments. In this regard, this research contributes a BIM-based algorithm for panelizing building components. The proposed algorithm is capable of determining the granularity of wall panels and optimizing the configuration of multi-wall panels under engineering constraints, thereby improving productivity. The proposed approach is implemented within an Autodesk Revit environment through application programming interface. A case study of a residential building is used to demonstrate the proposed approach.
Our study addresses a gap in published information on patient characteristics and treatment in menopause-specific interdisciplinary clinics. The chart review highlights the variety of symptom experience and complexity of care faced in a menopause clinic. Rigorous prospective studies including standardized data collection and follow-up are needed to help guide clinicians in managing complex menopause patients.
Purpose
Heavy industrial construction often relies on large mobile cranes to erect equipment and pre-assembled modules. Engineering calculations are required for the lifting analysis where lifting capacity is analyzed to ensure the feasibility of the lifting scenarios. Such engineering calculations are often presented in static formats, e.g. two-dimensional or three-dimensional models. However, it is difficult to help practitioners (e.g. lifting engineers, site crews and operators) understand the complexity of the lifting process and thus operational decisions are often made intuitively. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce a game-based simulation system to allow for interactive analysis of the lifting process to improve lifting efficiency and safety.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed method treats the mobile crane as a robot with degree-of-freedoms, and the movements are simulated in the Unity game environment. The lifting capacity is calculated dynamically based on the lifting object weight, rigging weight and lifting radius.
Findings
Compared with the four-dimensional visualization, this development has added a dimension of real-time interactive simulation; this allows the users to understand the complexity and feasibility of the lifting process.
Originality/value
The developed prototype has been tested and validated using a real case study from a heavy industrial project with the possibility of generalizing crane lifting configurations.
Designing a building, so that it adheres to all the relevant applicable constraints imposed by construction codes to cultural preferences to the owners' styles and aesthetics, can be a daunting task, requiring many laborious hours of review and modification. Given the increasing adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the design process, automated model checking is a pragmatic approach to expeditiously identifying errors that may otherwise cause issues later in the building phase. A variety of methods have been proposed, but they are opaque regarding the rules they consider, and they do not allow users to edit these rules. In this paper, we describe a simple, yet extendible, language for specifying building rules and a method for evaluating these rules in the context of a BIM instance, in order to assess the compliance of the building with these rules.
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