BIM-based Decision Support System for Concrete Formwork Design

The type and quantities of formwork system are necessary information for construction process of a concrete-framed building and the solution to this problem usually lays on the shoulders of specialized consulting firms or contractor's engineering department. These calculations are generally performed using available procedures and guidelines. The conventional formwork design process is manual and time-consuming, which requires considerable experience and attention to details. The emergence of building information modeling (BIM) in the AEC industry has allowed automation of many time-consuming tasks through application of object-oriented 3D modeling. In this project, a system was developed to automate formwork design process for the concrete-framed buildings. This method first extracts required data for the formwork design from the building information model of the project, which includes concrete elements’ dimensions, quantities, and spatial information. It then applies formwork design rules and a database of modular formworks to determine dimensions and type of the formwork for each element. This system demonstrated promising performance in automation of formwork design in two test models.