INTEGRATED BIM AND DES FRAMEWORK FOR EFFECTIVE TIME AND COST MANAGEMENT OF SLIPFORM OPERATIONS

Effective management of Slipforming operations is critical due to operation’s linearity that is considered a source of planning and proper cost management complications. This paper is presented to assist practitioners and researchers for automating the process of generation both time schedules and costs estimates simultaneously for Slipform projects by developing an Integrated BIM- based and DES software and framework. The BIM Schedule and Cost integrated (BSCI) framework reinforces both BIM and DES capabilities, enhanced by BIMs extracted information the quantities are used to generate DES input data in order to calculate the execution times for construction processes and exchange data through various software. Proposed research framework consists of: 1) Slipform BIM model that exports material quantity take-offs, schedules and required resources to an external database, 2) Discrete Event Simulation model encountering complete specification of the interdependencies between activities and resources and 3) Intelligent model that automatically collects, transfers and reserve data among various software programs. Furthermore, to illustrate the software’s functionality a preliminary prototype was developed for a Slipform case of study and validation of the software was conducted for evaluation purposes that showed robust results of 98% for Schedule generation and 96% for cost estimates.