Abstract
Spatial movements of workers and equipment should be carefully planned according to project plans. In particular, it is crucial for workers’ safety to prepare emergency evacuation paths according to changing construction site configurations and construction progress. However, creating evacuation paths for all crews for each day can be an extremely labor-intensive task if it is done manually. Consequently, in most construction projects, evacuation plans are not provided to managers and crews throughout the entire construction. Even state-of-the-art technologies do not suggest ways to generate evacuation paths according to changing progresses presented in 4-Dimensional Building Information Model (4D BIM). This research proposes a framework to automatically analyze, generate, and visualize the evacuation paths of multiple crews in 4D BIM, considering construction activities and site conditions at the specific project schedule. This research develops a prototype that enables users to define parameters for pathfinding, such as workspaces, material storage areas, and temporary structures to automatically identify the accessible evacuation paths. This prototype shows the secured evacuation paths in the 4D BIM environment and allows the users to organize the automatically generated evacuation paths. A case study using the BIM model of a real construction project involved in this paper demonstrates the potential of the proposed method.
Highlights
Throughout a dynamically changing construction project, managing limited spaces of a construction site is imperative to seamlessly facilitate linearly and cross-linking planned construction activities and operations
Since 4-Dimensional Building Information Model (4D Building Information Modeling (BIM)) can explicitly represent construction processes with associated resources based on a planned schedule, it is a desirable approach to plan work procedures, work crews’ paths, and evacuation scenarios according to a planned schedule
There was no incident of safety hazards that required evacuation from the construction site, the general contractor was able to provide evacuation paths that were generated based on BIM containing up-to-date project status as well as construction site conditions that are impacted by non-building components, such as workspaces, temporary structures, etc
Summary
Throughout a dynamically changing construction project, managing limited spaces of a construction site is imperative to seamlessly facilitate linearly and cross-linking planned construction activities and operations. A project manager or an associated industry professional must carefully create a site logistic and safety plan that explicitly illustrate secured work spaces and accessible pathways according to construction phases and various moving paths for workers, equipment, and material delivery. In a tool-box meeting where each work team shares daily work agendas, work crews are supposed to be educated about daily task details, designated work locations, relevant safety requirements, emergency manuals, and evacuation path information Such construction space management and path planning require labor-intensive. Since 4D BIM can explicitly represent construction processes with associated resources based on a planned schedule, it is a desirable approach to plan work procedures, work crews’ paths, and evacuation scenarios according to a planned schedule It can be extremely labor-intensive for project managers to manually analyze complex 4D. The conclusions and discussion section presents the conclusion, limitations, and suggestion for future studies
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