Automatic Tower Crane Lifting Path Planning Based on 4D Building Information Modeling: Fid-Bau Portal

Automatic Tower Crane Lifting Path Planning Based on 4D Building Information Modeling

Lin, Zhiyang / Petzold, Frank / Hsieh, Shang-Hsien

Lifting path planning of tower crane affect safety and efficiency of crane operations directly in a crane lifting cycle. Appropriate lifting path planning can not only avoid collision, but also save lifting time. Previous research focused on the fastest lifting path in path planning, this could be local optimum in lifting speed. But to cooperate with the fastest tower crane lifting plan, construction site may need more workers and resources, the related cost would be increased, and there would not be the global optimum in construction project level. On the other hand, 4D BIM could give effective support for construction planning and reflect the optimized schedule with resource balance in project level. Hence in real construction activities, the crane operations should follow the schedule planning in 4D BIM. Based on 4D BIM, this paper presents a method for automatic tower crane lifting path planning. We choose the concrete transport as a virtual test, the concrete is transported by hook with hopper and it has several target positions. A lifting path planning solution linked with 4D BIM is presented in this paper. Planning of securing position, transporting lifting path, releasing target position, and repositioning position in a crane lifting cycle are generated automatically in a virtual environment according to 4D BIM data. Such demonstration of our virtual test shows that the presented 4D-BIM-based automatic path planning method can generate lifting paths by following 4D BIM and give effective support to crane operations.