Editors

Turk Ž

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2016

Publication Title

Journal of Information Technology in Construction

ISSN

1874-4753

Volume

21

First Page

292

Last Page

314

Abstract

Limited and unavailable workspace for crews on the jobsite results in losses of productivity. With the increased usage of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the construction industry, four dimensional animation that brings together the three dimensional model of a building and its construction schedule to visualize construction process is emerging. To support space planning in the preconstruction management, this research provides a framework to integrate the knowledge of work envelope requirements among piping and steel trades. Typical work envelope requirements were defined through in-depth interviews with superintendents on U.S. industrial projects. Therefore, the rules and semantic information extracted from the interviews were summarized in seven decision trees, describing the geometric parameters relative to the body parts (e.g. chest and eye height). To compare the level of work envelope overlaps among global populations, anthropomorphic data was used to assess the absolute dimensions of the work envelopes. The results show that some work envelope requirements have a limited tolerance and are more sensitive to different body dimensions across global populations. It was found that in such situations the population anthropomorphic characteristics significantly impact the work envelope requirements. Therefore, this paper presents a decision supporting tool of work envelope requirements in compliment to space planning, which can improve the productivity, accuracy and efficiency of workspace management in the piping and steel trades.

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