An Analytical Model To Evaluate And Compare 3D/4D Modeling Productivity On Construction Projects

Project managers have applied 3D CAD technology on a number of pilot construction projects to visualize construction sequences and schedules. Construction engineers who worked on these pilot projects generally agree that 3D CAD technology offer benefits in supporting construction management tasks. However, the construction industry has not adopted the technology on a large scale within the last decade. Some practitioners and most researchers mainly attribute this to the immaturity of the commercially available 3D and 4D software. The Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) at Stanford University has collected empirical 3D implementation data on a number of construction projects since 1997. We developed a method that enables researchers to evaluate and compare the modeling productivity on construction projects using the collected data as input. To test this method we analyzed the 3D modeling productivity on a selected number of the pilot projects. A first chronological comparison of the analysis results shows that there have been improvements in the productivity of building the 3D models necessary to support decision making. Contrary to the technological focus of much of the research work and the belief among some practitioners this suggests that technology is no longer the main impeding factor towards a wide spread use of technology. Within this paper we first briefly introduce the observed pilot projects and the data sets CIFE researchers collected on them. We then explain the method we developed to evaluate and compare the 3D modeling productivity on these construction projects. We finally discuss the initial findings showing trends that the productivity of building 3D models is improving. In particular we show how these findings contradict with the beliefs that technology is still the main impeding factor towards a large scale implementation of 3D models on construction projects.