Publications / 2007 Proceedings of the 24th ISARC, Kochi, India

Automation of Scheme Preparation and BoQ Calculation for L&T-Aluform

Nagi Reddy Sattigari, Ashwin Mahalingam, George Thomas
Pages 273-280 (2007 Proceedings of the 24th ISARC, Kochi, India, ISBN 978-81-904235-1-9, ISSN 2413-5844)
Abstract:

Aluminium Formwork System is a comparatively new technology in India. Generally, aluminium formwork consists of standard sized panels and custom sized panels. The total area of custom shaped formwork elements can be reduced by optimizing the allocation of standard-sized formwork elements. This can in turn lead to large savings in formwork costs and time for scheme preparations. An application to automate the optimization and scheme preparation for L&T Aluminium Formwork was developed using Visual Basic 6.0. The application captures spatial details of a building element from an AutoCAD Drawing and uses an optimization algorithm to develop a formwork scheme as well as a Bill of Quantities. The application also takes into account the formwork elements available at site and optimizes their usage. The tool has been validated with four cases taken from two ongoing projects. The validation shows improvement in usage of standard sized formwork elements in the order of 10% to 13% for complex shapes and 1% to 2% for simple shapes.

Keywords: Scheme Preparation, Aluminium Formwork, Bill of Quantities, Optimization