Time Management & Resource Leveling of Mass Housing Projects Using Incorporation of Building Information Modeling and Metaheuristics

Abstract

Abstract: In the last few decades, construction industry has faced numerous challenges such as low productivity and low invest return rate compared to other industries, increased cost of labor, unpredicted costs due to lack of coordination between beneficiaries, high time-consumption of managing changes in projects and delayed and inappropriate decisions. These factors led to the development of new fields such as Information Technology (IT) and integrated project delivery systems in this industry. “Building Information Modeling” is one of the most important new concepts in overcoming these challenges. A project’s success is one of the biggest and most important goals and concerns of managers and all the persons involved in that project. Success is what unites all the efforts of team members. Building information models, as one of new technologies in the construction industry, uses precise outcome, visual models and information totally understandable by the members to minimize decision-making errors regarding construction problems. In this study, considering the importance of decision-making in construction workshops and especially projects with mass amount of materials, labor and machinery (such as mass house building projects), the incorporation of building information modeling and metaheuristics has been used in times when the required resources exceed available resources. In order to simplify problem-solving for project’s used resources, concrete was considered as the most used material and in times when requested concrete was more than the produced concrete, the scenario of levelling the resources were considered in order to equalize the requested concrete with the batching’s maximum producible amount. Considering the factors of time and quality that each scenario imposed on the project, this scenario was confirmed by an expert group.