Spatio-temporal validation of construction projects against path conflicts.


Spatio-temporal validation of construction projects against path conflicts.

Authors

Vitaly Semenov, Konstantine Kazakov, Vladislav Zolotov

Abstract

Trustworthy planning is a challenging problem that attracts much attention of academics and practitioners involved in construction project management. High complexity and concurrency of construction processes overlapping in space dimensions and across time, makes realistic planning non-trivial. Virtual prototyping and, particularly 4D modeling, is a promising methodological and technological approach that can help on this way. It assumes a realistic visualization of construction operations based on building information model and highly automatic detection of spatio-temporal conflicts. Being identified and resolved at earlier planning phase, the conflicts may be avoided at construction phases thereby improving final productivity and reducing project risks and waste. Modern commercial and free 4D modeling systems provide for basic functions to identify and report simple clashes induced by explicit collisions of two or more construction elements. But they are not capable to foresee more sophisticated conflicts caused by absence of collision-free paths to deliver the elements to given destination locations. It becomes especially important for large-scale projects simulated in pseudo-dynamic mode under the suggestion that scene elements can appear, disappear and move only at discrete points of time. In the paper a new method for validation of construction project schedules against path conflicts is presented. It is closely connected with a global path planning method early developed for static 3D scenes. The original method allows extracting a topology map from a metric occupancy representation of the analyzed scene and fast routing over the extracted map graph using well-known shortest path algorithms. The presented method generalizes the original one by means of incremental and concordant updates of all the metric and topological structures as the changes occur in the simulated pseudo-dynamic scene. Conducted experiments showed that the method exhibits high performance for multiple path planning requests and can be applied for validation of construction project schedules.

Edition

CONVR'2012: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality, Taipei, Taiwan. Publisher: National Taiwan University Press, 2012. Pp. 542-551.

Research Group

System integration and multi-disciplinary collaborative environments

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