Providing Cost and Constructability Feedback to Designers

Reducing the cost of construction is a primary concern for owners, designers, and builders of facilities. Today, project teams often perform constructability reviews during the design phase to identify design constraints that limit a constructor's ability to perform construction operations effectively and increase construction cost. However, the current manual process is time-consuming and prone to error and does not identify the cost implications of constructability problems. Consequently, many constructability problems either go undetected or unnoticed, resulting in inefficiencies in the project delivery process and increased construction cost. This paper describes a vision for on-line computer tools that provide cost-specific constructability feedback to help project teams develop more cost-effective and constructable designs. Through a case example, we outline new functionality and the corresponding formalisms and mechanisms needed to model the cost implications of different constructability problems and identify the specific design conditions that impact constructability and increase construction cost. These contributions will allow project teams to leverage IFC-based product models and enable the necessary functionality to identify constructability problems and their impact on construction costs early in the project delivery process.