Enhancing Construction and Design Review Processes: Leveraging Extended Realities and Reality Capture Technologies

Abstract

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been utilized to enhance the performance of design review tasks through 3D visualization and coordination to improve productivity and reduce rework. However, there are still issues that remain unresolved and only fixed on-site. Since previous studies did not pinpoint why BIM-based Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP) coordination (BIM coordination) does not capture all design issues before they are found on-site, the first part of this dissertation investigates this issue through experts’ semi-structured interviews; among the most mentioned causes are not considering maintainability, and operability, as well as inaccurate as-built updates in BIM coordination. From the initial findings, the issue of lack of experience in BIM coordination meetings was identified. This led to exploring the use of Mixed reality (MR) and Virtual Reality (VR) to address this challenge. The use of MR helps visualize and review the 3D models in the field, whereas VR enables professionals to conduct the review remotely. Therefore, the second research question evaluates and compares these two tools in terms of decision accuracy and time spent on design assessment of issues that are typically missed from BIM coordination. Results show the use of MR improved error detection for 8 design review and reduced decision-making time. Where the use of MR only reduced decision-making time for geometry checking without improvement in error detection. The third and last research question in this dissertation tackles the issue of inaccurate as-built updates. The availability of BIMs nowadays and the advancement in reality capture technologies expedite the comparison between built and planned (scan-vs-BIM) elements. However, although scan-vs-BIM solutions have been proposed for more than a decade, utilizing scan-vs-BIM is not yet common practice among contractors. That might be the result of a lack of available implementable solutions that resemble current practices. To address this challenge, a new simplified approach is proposed, which is a registration-less scan-vs-BIM that compares features of built elements to their corresponding as-designed elements. The proposed solution is demonstrated through the case of verifying the location and sizes of MEP sleeves in a reinforced concrete slab before pouring. The approach was tested on two case studies and results show that it successfully detects MEP sleeves, and correctly flags deviations when the deviation threshold is set to 2 cm.