Final report : task 4 : waste minimisation in construction

The Regenerating Construction Project for the CRC for Construction Innovation aims to assist in the delivery of demonstrably superior ‘green’ buildings. Components of the project address eco-efficient redesign, achieving a smaller ecological footprint, enhancing indoor environment and minimising waste in design and construction. The refurbishment of Council House 1 for Melbourne City Council provides an opportunity to develop and demonstrate tools that will be of use for commercial building refurbishment generally. It is hoped that the refurbishment will act as an exemplar project to demonstrate environmentally friendly possibilities for office building refurbishment

Information technology applications for planning in deconstruction

In recent years, there has been obvious emphasis on the shift from design and construction of new facilities to maintenance, refurbishment, and demolition management of existing facilities. Demolition technology has gradually changed from conventional destruction to the recently developed deconstruction. Demolition management, particularly deconstruction management, is becoming a novel, but a fertile teaching and research discipline. This paper focuses on an important issue of deconstruction management, how to work out a deconstruction plan using information technologies.<br /

Visualisation development for building demolition planning

Demolition has recently been more concerned with the potential damage to the environment by its generated wastes. Waste exchange is apparently the main means by which the problem is currently dealt with. There is little or no consideration on wastes during the planning or designing stage. By utilising a knowledge system and visualisation technologies, a waste management plan can be integrated into the 4D model so as to effectively promote the interactions between demolition waste demanders and the demolition designer. As a result, the 4D visualisation provides not only the graphical schedule for the demolition process, but also the waste handling plan and waste production schedule. This research aims to analysis the integration technology of a waste management plan and the 4D visualisation model for a demolition project and to discuss the related technical and management issues. The integrated demolition visualisation enables to facilitate waste handling during the demolition processes thus to achieve environmentally friendly demolition.<br /

Proactive-reactive, robust scheduling and capacity planning of deconstruction projects under uncertainty

A project planning and decision support model is developed and applied to identify and reduce risk and uncertainty in deconstruction project planning. It allows calculating building inventories based on sensor information and construction standards and it computes robust project plans for different scenarios with multiple modes, constrained renewable resources and locations. A reactive and flexible planning element is proposed in the case of schedule infeasibility during project execution

Building Information Modeling (BIM) for existing buildings - literature review and future needs

Abstract not availableRebekka Volk, Julian Stengel, Frank Schultman

A survey of variants and extensions of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) consists of activities that must be scheduled subject to precedence and resource constraints such that the makespan is minimized. It has become a well-known standard problem in the context of project scheduling which has attracted numerous researchers who developed both exact and heuristic scheduling procedures. However, it is a rather basic model with assumptions that are too restrictive for many practical applications. Consequently, various extensions of the basic RCPSP have been developed. This paper gives an overview over these extensions. The extensions are classified according to the structure of the RCPSP. We summarize generalizations of the activity concept, of the precedence relations and of the resource constraints. Alternative objectives and approaches for scheduling multiple projects are discussed as well. In addition to popular variants and extensions such as multiple modes, minimal and maximal time lags, and net present value-based objectives, the paper also provides a survey of many less known concepts. --project scheduling,modeling,resource constraints,temporal constraints,networks

Deconstruction project planning based on automatic acquisition and reconstruction of building information for existing buildings

As energetic, health and environmental requirements for buildings are changing, deconstruction of buildings in the course of retrofits or replacing construction is increasingly important. To plan change measures in existing buildings, buildings have to be audited manually which is associated with great effort. In our contribution, we propose and describe a combined system of a hardware sensor with software modules for building information acquisition, reconstruction and project planning. Furthermore, technical requirements, the acquired data, user interaction and system architecture are discussed. Our tool enables planner, experts or decision makers to inspect a building and at the same time digitally audit the building room by room. For this purpose, point clouds are acquired, analysed and a 3D building model is automatically derived to record it. Furthermore, the acquired data is automatically analysed in realtime to detect construction elements that are saved in a database. Then, based on the generated building element database building reconstruction and planning algorithms use the information for building inventorying and project planning. This allows integrated planning of decontamination, site clearance, and deconstruction activities, as well as to coordinate secondary raw material recovery, resources, logistics, material storage and recycling options time and cost efficiently onsite. Results from first field tests on acquisition, reconstruction and deconstruction planning are presented and discussed. Finally, a summary and a conclusion are given. This is followed by an outlook on potential future research and application areas

BIM extension for the sustainability appraisal of conceptual steel design

Contemporary advancements in Information Technology and the efforts from various research initiatives in the AEC industry are showing evidence of progress with the emergence of building information mod- elling (BIM). BIM presents the opportunity of electronically modelling and managing the vast amount of information embedded in a building project, from its conception to end-of-life. Researchers have been looking at extensions to expand its scope. Sustainability is one such modelling extension that is in need of development. This is becoming pertinent for the structural engineer as recent design criteria have put great emphasis on the sustainability credentials in addition to the traditional criteria of structural integrity, constructability and cost. With the complexity of designs, there are now needs to provide deci- sion support tools to aid in the assessment of the sustainability credentials of design solutions. Such tools would be most beneficial at the conceptual design stage so that sustainability is built into the design solu- tion starting from its inception. The sustainability of buildings is related to life cycle and is measured using indicator-terms such as life cycle costing, ecological footprint and carbon footprint. This paper proposes a modelling framework combining these three indicators in providing sustainability assessments of alterna- tive design solutions based on the economic and environmental sustainability pillars. It employs the prin- ciples of feature-based modelling to extract construction-specific information from product models for the purposes of sustainability analysis. A prototype system is implemented using .NET and linked to the BIM enabled software, Revit StructuresTM. The system appraises alternative design solutions using multi-crite- ria performance analysis. This work demonstrates that current process and data modelling techniques can be employed to model sustainability related information to inform decisions right from the early stages of structural design. It concludes that the utilized information modelling representations – in the form of a process model, implementation algorithms and object-based instantiations – can capture sustainability related information to inform decisions at the early stages of the structural design process

Deconstruction project planning based on automatic acquisition and reconstruction of building information for existing buildings

As energetic, health and environmental requirements for buildings are changing, deconstruction of buildings in the course of retrofits or replacing construction is increasingly important. To plan change measures in existing buildings, buildings have to be audited manually which is associated with great effort. In our contribution, we propose and describe a combined system of a hardware sensor with software modules for building information acquisition, reconstruction and project planning. Furthermore, technical requirements, the acquired data, user interaction and system architecture are discussed. Our tool enables planner, experts or decision makers to inspect a building and at the same time digitally audit the building room by room. For this purpose, point clouds are acquired, analysed and a 3D building model is automatically derived to record it. Furthermore, the acquired data is automatically analysed in realtime to detect construction elements that are saved in a database. Then, based on the generated building element database building reconstruction and planning algorithms use the information for building inventorying and project planning. This allows integrated planning of decontamination, site clearance, and deconstruction activities, as well as to coordinate secondary raw material recovery, resources, logistics, material storage and recycling options time and cost efficiently onsite. Results from first field tests on acquisition, reconstruction and deconstruction planning are presented and discussed. Finally, a summary and a conclusion are given. This is followed by an outlook on potential future research and application areas