Construction schedule review in GIS with a navigable 3D animation of project activities

Abstract This paper presents a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based navigable 3D animation of project activities to visualise and review a construction project schedule as an alternative to the existing 4D CAD tools. Most of the commercial tools allow planners to build a 4D model but lack features like generation and manipulation of developed 4D model on a single platform. To facilitate the 4D model manipulation, both 3D model and the project schedule are developed within GIS. However, models generated by using popular commercial tool like y and the schedule generated in Primavera or Microsoft Project can also be utilised within the proposed approach. The animation of the project activities utilises dynamic linkage between activities of the schedule and the corresponding 3D components, thus, allowing detection of missing activities and logical errors in the project schedule. The database management capabilities of GIS are also utilised to maintain and update the construction resource database to facilitate the project planning. Most of the existing 4D technologies do not have project management capabilities and are used mainly for planning and design phases of a project. GIS based approach suggested in this paper may be used as the project management tool at any stage of the project. Along with ‘what’ is to be built ‘when’, a navigable 3D GIS based animation conveys ‘where’ in the space and offer powerful schedule visualisation, planning and querying capabilities.