BIM DESIGN FLOW FOR CONSTRUCTION SITE

Construction site planning is an important task in a design team whereas a proper design of construction activities has a great influence in time and cost saving as well as in workers’ safety. Designers need to focus on site planning since the preliminary phase of building design in order to point out construction criticalities of the project that can affect execution phase. On the contrary, a scarce attention to operational issues during design phase is detectable in industry. Despite of the rapid diffusion of Building Information Modeling (BIM), a lack of BIM tools specifically studied for site design is detectable. Then the purpose of this paper is to describe a workflow developed with the aim to integrate site planning in a BIM design process, gaining thus operational advantages. The development of the workflow follows designers’ needs collected through the active participation of the authors in several design teams. A strong coordination and information sharing with other disciplines is the main task of the workflow, so that design choices can take into consideration operational issues as well. In order to simplify and accelerate the tasks of the site designer, the system is based on the use of some tools (such as databases of construction site elements and automatic checking tools), specifically developed for the purpose. The satisfaction of the designers involved demonstrates the efficiency of the system, in particular concerning the decrease of design time and the assistance of design choices thanks to operational information management.