Evaluation of a case study to design a BIM-based cycle planning concept

Cycle Planning, or Takt Time Planning, is a key method to reduce the variability between different activities within the execution of a construction. A construction section such as a floor consists of multiple work zones, which should have continuous flow and similar cycle times to efficiently coordinate needed resources. However, for concrete structures it is often difficult to find suitable sizes of casting segments and their grouping to work zones. Nowadays, scheduling experts usually use their practical experience to find an intuitive solution for Cycle Planning, which might be sub-optimal. The objective of our research is thus to develop a semiautomatic method to generate optimal work zones for a cycle. The proposed solution is a BIM-based Cycle Planning concept for the cast in-situ construction method of walls. This paper lays the foundation for our concept and evaluates different designs of Cycle Planning layouts to ensure the practical relevance of the generated work zones. We provide an approach to the semiautomatic method: after splitting all wall objects into smaller sections, an optimization algorithm aggregates wall sections into casting segments and casting segments into work zones.