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Construction site planning is an important task in a design team whereas a proper design of construction activities has a great influence in time and cost saving as well as in workers’ safety. Designers need to focus on site planning since the preliminary phase of building design in order to point out construction criticalities of the project that can affect execution phase. On the contrary, a scarce attention to operational issues during design phase is detectable in industry. Despite of the rapid diffusion of Building Information Modeling (BIM), a lack of BIM tools specifically studied for site design is detectable. Then the purpose of this paper is to describe a workflow developed with the aim to integrate site planning in a BIM design process, gaining thus operational advantages. The development of the workflow follows designers’ needs collected through the active participation of the authors in several design teams. A strong coordination and information sharing with other disciplines is the main task of the workflow, so that design choices can take into consideration operational issues as well. In order to simplify and accelerate the tasks of the site designer, the system is based on the use of some tools (such as databases of construction site elements and automatic checking tools), specifically developed for the purpose. The satisfaction of the designers involved demonstrates the efficiency of the system, in particular concerning the decrease of design time and the assistance of design choices thanks to operational information management.

In the last years, the digital evolution involved the construction sector and produced radical changes in projects elaboration and realization. The diffusion of digital models implies a particular attention on information related to the building elements. For what concerns construction planning and management, this information need to be related to the information of the elements proper of a construction site such as equipment and machines. A deep research focused on the manufacturers’ sheets showed how technical information related to construction equipment are often non-homogenous and incomplete, probably because of a lack of a precise standard. The aims of this research are then the definition of a proper standard information structure for construction equipment and its digitalization thanks to the use of relational Databases and Building Information Models. To do this the amount of information collected from a wide number of datasheets have been standardized and organized in homogenous informative sets to be related in order to gain the correct information package of an equipment. The realization of a relational database permitted to store such data in a digital format and to search them in an efficient way. The realization of a BIM library permitted to provide to designers and firms a tool able to improve and automatize design choices in terms of construction issues.