Production Planning with an Enriched BIM-Based Heuristic Construction Order Model to Improve the Efficiency of Complex Prefabricated Projects
Kamyab Aghajamali et al.
Abstract
Prefabricated projects are increasingly employed and customized in diverse construction projects. Hence, efficient and adaptable planning is essential for improving production productivity in these projects. Concerning structural steel prefabrication projects, essential engineering specifications are necessary for forecasting labor hours at workstations and devising construction orders for steel elements, improving production productivity. Henceforth, this study develops a framework to utilize the Building Information Model (BIM) and Numerical Control (NC) data for a steel structure project and productivity data from time studies to estimate labor hours in a steel fabrication plant. The proposed framework identifies the most relevant engineering specifications for each station by analyzing the productivity data. The specifications are then extracted from the project three-dimensional (3D) BIM models and also used to develop prediction models. Consequently, the extracted specifications are integrated with prediction models to provide labor-hour estimation. Furthermore, discrete event simulation (DES) is used to simulate the assembly flow through the plant, and a heuristic approach is used to determine the optimal construction order for each steel element. The framework validation demonstrated a robust 99% correlation between labor-hour estimations and productivity reports from a Canadian steel fabrication plant. The optimization method, however, improves operations, reducing labor costs by 12.99%. A comparative analysis with the genetic algorithm (GA) highlights the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach, offering reduced computational complexity. This study fills a key gap in production planning by integrating BIM-based feature extraction, statistical productivity modeling, and heuristic order optimization into a practical system for prefabricated steel fabrication. Additionally, a management dashboard for production planning has been developed to enhance practical application and decision making in production management.
1 citation
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06 |
| M · momentum | 0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.