BIM-Based Planning of Temporary Structures for Construction Safety

Despite significant advances in Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology for construction planning, existing technology still lack the capabilities of planning and analyzing temporary structures. While temporary structures such as scaffolding and temporary stair towers significantly impact construction safety, they often do not appear in BIM. Temporary structure objects manually inserted into BIM cannot automatically generate information of their impact on construction safety. Understanding this deficiency, this research attempts to generate required temporary structures and analyze associated safety risk automatically. Specifically, this research focused on planning of temporary stair towers used during roof construction activities. For automation, a set of algorithms were created that analyze geometric conditions in BIM, generate required temporary stair towers, and analyze their impact on safety. The algorithms were imbedded into a commercially-available BIM platform and tested on an ongoing construction project. As a result, optimized locations and shapes of temporary stair towers and associated potential safety hazards were identified and visualized in BIM and schedule. The main contribution of this research would be to automatically perform more practical construction safety planning by incorporating temporary structures.