Automatic generation of the vertical transportation demands during the construction of high-rise buildings using BIM

The explosion of high-rise building projects has increased the awareness on the importance of the planning and management of vertical transportation systems (i.e., tower cranes, construction elevators and concrete pumps). Although researchers have made beneficial efforts in several aspects of vertical transportation systems (e.g., optimal design capacities and layouts), the estimation of demands on vertical transportation systems (i.e., the quantity of construction resources associated with location, trip date and vertical transportation mode) has not been fully integrated. Currently, this process is still done manually. Building information modeling (BIM) provides the possibility to automate this process, decreasing the time it takes to gather that information and reducing errors associated with manual collection and quantification. This paper proposes a BIM-based framework to generate the vertical transportation demands during the construction of high-rise buildings. It consists of six parts: (1) determine the vertical transportation information of building materials, (2) generate the vertical transportation information of temporary construction materials, (3) link the project schedule with construction materials, (4) generate the vertical transportation information of construction workers, (5) determine the vertical transportation mode for construction materials, and (6) generate the vertical transportation demands. A prototype tool, in the form of an add-in using Revit API, has been developed to demonstrate the functionality of the proposed framework through testing the BIM model of a 36-story high-rise building. The findings show that the framework allows to exploit BIM to generate the information needed to determine the vertical transportation demands quickly and effortlessly.