A BIM-based Labor Crew Moving Path Obstruction Detection Approach

The Architecture/Engineering/Construction industry is labor-intensive. There are numerous labor crews working on site within confined workspaces. As labor crews often move from one place to another due to workspace alternation or material transportation, it is very important to detect and eliminate the potential obstacles that obstructs their moving paths in advance. This paper proposed a Building-Information-Modelling (BIM) based labor crew path analysis approach which contains five main steps: labor crew modelling, building component classification, site map generation, automated path searching and path obstruction detection. The correctness of the method is verified by a validation test. The result of this paper shows that the proposed approach is capable of detecting potential path obstructions so as to provide support for in-door or out-door moving path optimization for labor crews.