Automatic design and planning of scaffolding systems using building information modeling

Considering their significant impact on construction projects, scaffolding as part of the temporary facilities category in construction must be thoroughly designed, planned, procured, and managed. The current practices in planning and managing scaffolding though is often manual and reactive, especially when a construction project is already underway. Widespread results are code compliance problems, inefficiency, and waste of procuring and managing material for scaffolding systems. We developed a rule-based system that automatically plans scaffolding systems for pro-active management in Building Information Modeling (BIM). The scope of the presented work is limited to traditional pipe and board scaffolding systems. A rule was prepared based on the current practice of planning and installing scaffolding systems. Our computational algorithms automatically recognize geometric and non-geometric conditions in building models and produce a scaffolding system design which a practitioner can use in the field. We implemented our automated scaffolding system for a commercially-available BIM software and tested it in a case study project. The system thoroughly identified the locations in need of scaffolding and generated the corresponding scaffolding design in BIM. Further results show, the proposed approach successfully generated a scaffolding system-loaded BIM model that can be utilized in communication, billing of materials, scheduling simulation, and as a benchmark for accurate field installation and performance measurement.