Improved Tower Cranes Operation Using Integrated 3D BIM Model and GPS Technology

Tower and mobile cranes are the most commonly used equipment on building construction jobsites. They play an essential role in material handling, placement, assembly and erection operations. Statistics reveal that during the last decade, the construction industry has suffered globally from crane related accidents. Hence, detailed study of different aspects of crane-based activity is important in terms of time and safety. There are several studies for enhancing safety conditions of crane operations on jobsites to decrease the number of fatalities and even increase the productivity. Existing approaches and studies have deployed wireless networks and tracking sensors to detect and identify workers, but high initial cost for installation and maintenance of these technologies and inappropriate feedback for disregarding workers privacy hold down their usability. The purpose of this study is to develop a proactive lifting operation management system to prevent potential accidents caused by tower cranes’ components through using GPS in integrated 3D BIM models. In this study, generated workspaces are utilized to demonstrate areas occupied by workers or equipment instead of using individual tags for each entity. As construction workers may leave their work zone for some reasons, 3D video tracking is applied for identifying and tracking if workers leave their pre-defined workspaces. The developed model captures the load position in real time and subsequently compares the load’s bounding box position with defined area in BIM model. In the developed model, tower crane’s load dimensions and starting point of the loading procedure are inserted and subsequently the model updates the load’s position in real time. The updated position in the 3D model is checked proactively with existing spaces to send alerts in case of overlapping. Two case studies are used to demonstrate the concept and to validate the feasibility of the proposed method. In the first case study the added plug-in is used to generate workspaces for material, equipment and labors and in the second one, the real time safety system is validated in two different scenarios. The developed plug-in in Revit environment enhances timely proximity detection for enhanced safety since it detects objects based on pre-defined spaces and retrieves crane’s load location in the model in real time. Identifying resources of interest which being free of tag and developing the real time conflict detection in Revit can be addressed as main findings of this study