Application of BIM-integrated Construction Simulation to Construction Production Planning

Traditional construction planning based on historical data and heuristic adjustment can no longer incorporate all the operational details and guarantee the expected performance. The variation between the expected and the actual production leads to cost overruns or delay. Although predicting reliable productivity on construction site is getting more important, the difficulty of this increases. In this regard, this paper suggested to develop BIM-integrated simulation framework. This framework could predict productivity dynamics by considering factors affecting on construction productivity at operational phase. We developed the following processes; 1) enabling a BIM model to produce input data for simulation; 2) developing the construction operation simulation; 3) running simulation using BIM data and obtaining productivity results. The BIM-integrated simulation framework was tested with structural steel erection model because steel erection work is one of the most critical process influencing on the whole construction budget and duration. We could improve to predict more dynamic productivity from this framework, and this reliable productivity helps construction managers to optimize resource allocation, increase schedule reliability, save storage cost, and reduce material loss.