Decision Support System for Site Layout Planning

Construction Site Layout Planning (SLP) is one among the processes that consider decision-making as essential to achieving the desired project performance. In lack of decision support system (DSS), the project planners employ learnings from experience to make decisions that often lead to sub-optimal planning of site, resulting in congestion, safety issues and loss in productivity. Therefore, to mitigate such risks, the SLP targets to identify the temporary facilities (TFs) required to aid the construction and optimally locate these TFs. SLP usually requires all the stakeholders to reach consensus and to aid this a few operations research (OR) models are developed in past studies. While SLP is often viewed as an optimal allocation problem by present research, the decision-making aspect involving multiple stakeholders is understudied. As a result, state-of-art research in modelling and optimal allocation using OR methods are not implemented on site. Therefore, targeting the decision-making in SLP, an approach is demonstrated to enhance the process through efficient exchange of information. This study employs building information modelling (BIM) to make data available for the modelled optimization problem. In addition to this, to foster the decision-making during the SLP task, the study presents an augmented reality (AR) enabled site layout planning decision support system (SLP-DSS) framework to aid the construction practitioners in SLP. The developed DSS with the functionality of AR integrated optimization is designed to make understand the generated solutions to the stakeholders in an efficient manner and targets to ease out the SLP process with a clear perspective exchange.