Current construction practice usually provides a variety of different execution alternatives for each project objective. Normally, only one possible construction schedule is selected and defined manually. Thus, decisions are often narrowed down and made at a stage where this cannot be done in a reliable way. In many cases it would be useful if more than one alternative solution could be investigated. However, modeling solution alternatives is very tedious and is not supported by standard solution approaches. This paper presents an approach for generating a construction schedule that includes various alternatives within a single model as well as provisions for the reuse of experiences from former projects. The schedule can be generated on the basis of independent construction tasks. Associated constraints are formally described by the use of Feature Logic theory. Thus, a schedule can be generated automatically at any time in the process. This should lead to a higher degree of flexibility and the application of proven solutions to problems that might occur on construction sites. In such cases, a faster reaction can be achieved by responding with predefined, tested alternatives. For practical reasons the reuse of already predefined solutions is extremely significant. Therefore, the application of case-based reasoning is investigated in this work. Partial construction solutions can be stored, retrieved, and re-used using a casebased system.
Construction scheduling is usually limited to the documentation of one final construction schedule, and construction alternatives that might have been considered during the planning process are usually not included in the final schedule. Moreover, a formal control of construction schedules in terms of completeness and correctness is very limited, because existing methods, such as 4D visualization, are insufficiently integrated into the construction planning process. This paper addresses the development of a software framework that has been designed to support the process of construction scheduling. As will be shown in this paper, the process of construction scheduling, which is usually carried out manually, is conducted automatically to a large extent using building information models (BIM) and 4D visualization. Due to the logical interconnections of BIM objects and construction tasks, flexible schedules and visual representations of construction processes are automatically generated without permanent human interaction.
This chapter describes different possibilities for programming BIM applications with particular emphasis on processing data in the vendor-neutral Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) exchange format. It describes how to access data in STEP clear text encoding and discusses the differences between early and late binding. Given the increasingly important role of ifcXML in the exchange of IFC data, the chapter also examines different access variants such as SAX (Simple API for XML) and DOM (Document Object Model), and discusses the different geometry representations of IFC and their interpretation. Furthermore, the chapter gives a brief overview of the development of add-ins as a means of allowing existing software to be adapted to user-specific needs. The chapter ends with a brief overview of cloudbased platforms and a short introduction to visual programming.
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