BIM plug-in technology for construction waste quantification

Current building management standards demand that construction waste management occurs in the planning phase. This paper presents the development of a plug-in as a BIM tool to predict waste generation. As a research strategy, the plug-in was applied to a single-family housing project, the respective construction wastes were predicted in the BIM technology and compared to the literature. Through waste generation indexes, some planning indicators were calculated. The identified wastes were automatically classified, and a management structure was designed. The study showed that the best results are obtained when the construction waste is estimated from Actual Built Volume instead of Apparent Constructed Volume like the traditional models uses. In conclusion, adopting a plug-in do predict construction waste has proved to be advantageous. A specific advantage of the proposed method is that the plug-in user may adopt their waste generation indexes according to the regional and the production team aspects. The adoption of a plug-in made the acquisition and processing of data fast and versatile.