Integrating Crane Information Models in BIM for Checking the Compliance of Lifting Plan Requirements

Cranes typically represent the single biggest equipment investment deployed on a construction site. The success of lifting operations depends on addressing project conditions and adequate site safety management. The Crane Lifting Plan (CLP) is a safety document wherein the information required for planning crane lifting operations are encapsulated and analyzed. A range of regulatory, safety and operational requirements must be complied with. Chief among these considerations is the correct selection and siting of cranes to support the lifting operations. The current practice of developing and checking a CLP is a manual, tedious and potentially error-prone process. Recent advances in Building Information Modeling (BIM) may help to address these difficulties. This paper presents a formalized representation framework for CLP requirements. A parametric Crane Information Model, which enables various regulatory and safety information to be incorporated is also developed. The result of this paper is a step towards automatically checking the compliance of CLP requirements. Finally, a case study of an academic building is used to validate the proposed framework.