BIM plug-in technology for construction waste quantification

Abstract

Current building management standards demand that construction waste management occurs in the planning phase. This paper presents the development of a plug-in as a BIM tool to predict waste generation. As a research strategy, the plug-in was applied to a single-family housing project, the respective construction wastes were predicted in the BIM technology and compared to the literature. Through waste generation indexes, some planning indicators were calculated. The identified wastes were automatically classified, and a management structure was designed. The study showed that the best results are obtained when the construction waste is estimated from Actual Built Volume instead of Apparent Constructed Volume like the traditional models uses. In conclusion, adopting a plug-in do predict construction waste has proved to be advantageous. A specific advantage of the proposed method is that the plug-in user may adopt their waste generation indexes according to the regional and the production team aspects. The adoption of a plug-in made the acquisition and processing of data fast and versatile.

Environmental Impact Assessment of Construction Waste Recycling versus Disposal Scenarios Using an LCA-BIM Tool during the Design Stage

“…Step 1: Quantifying the Types and Quantities of Recyclable CW in BIM Several studies have shown the relationship between the design that covers the construction solutions, materials, and technologies used in buildings and the types and quantities of waste generated [70][71][72]. The types and quantities of waste generated can be ascertained from the building design: manually, using waste quantification models [51,73]; semi-automatically, in various BIM platforms (Allplan 2021.02, Nemetschek AG, Munich, Germany; Archicad 24, Graphisoft, Nemetschek AG, Munich, Germany; Audodesk Revit 21.1.1, Autodesk Inc., San Rafael, California, USA) [22,25,74]; or automatically, such as in BIM (Revit) [23,24,46]. Specifically, certain studies [46,74] integrated the quantification model [51] into BIM, so that automated CDW quantification can be carried out by the designer without effort nor time consumption.…”

“…In this vein, Building Information Modelling (BIM) has become a powerful tool for the management of building information [19][20][21] and for the automation of calculations during the design stage [16,21]. In the field of CDW, BIM has been applied with several approaches: (i) to predict CDW generation [22][23][24][25];…”