Automatic As-Built BIM Creation of Precast Concrete Bridge Deck Panels Using Laser Scan Data

Precast concrete bridge deck panels are commonly used for bridge constructions because they enable faster construction and have less impact on traffic flow. The quality of connections between adjacent precast elements must be ensured to guarantee the overall structural integrity of precast systems. Therefore, the dimensional quality of precast concrete panels should be inspected before they are shipped to construction sites for installation. However, current quality inspection of precast concrete elements primarily relies on manual inspection. Furthermore, the as-built dimensions of precast elements are usually stored in paper sheets or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, making it difficult to visualize and manage the as-built dimensions. This study develops a technique to automatically estimate the dimensions of precast concrete bridge deck panels and create as-built building information modeling (BIM) models to store the real dimensions of the panels. First, the proposed technique conducts scan planning to find the optimal scanner locations for scan data acquisition. Then, the scan data of the target panel are acquired and preprocessed to remove noise data and to register multiple scans in a global coordinate system. From the registered scan data, the as-built geometries of the target panel are estimated. In the last step, an as-built BIM model is created on the basis of the previously estimated geometries. The proposed technique is validated on a laboratory-scale specimen and a full-scale precast concrete bridge deck panel. The experimental results show that the proposed technique can accurately and efficiently estimate the dimensions of full-scale precast concrete bridge deck panels with an accuracy of 3 mm and automatically create as-built BIM models of the panels.