GIS-Based Buffering for Construction Workspace Management

Space on construction site is a limited resource. Building elements, construction activities, and material storage and access compete for limited spaces throughout the entire project life, leading to space conflicts that occur frequently on site. Space conflicts could substantially hinder the performance of interfering activities. Both academic and commercial computer applications are available to detect solid-solid conflicts (physical geometry crashes) among site objects, but space-solid overlaps and space-space overlaps are not well supported, especially for objects with complex shapes. In addition, very few researches incorporate the evolution of the workspace. A challenge exists in how to efficiently store, represent, and update the geometry data. This paper presents a study on buffering workspaces of arbitrary shapes and detecting the space-solid and space-space overlaps in a 4D context with an implementation on the platform of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The buffering approach is based on a Uniformly-Distributed Points (UDP) method that examines the distance between each point and a solid geometry with an arbitrary shape. The proposed method eliminates the needs to scan all the workspace geometries for analysis, especially facilitates the case that the workspace geometry is evolving along time. A prototype was implemented in a commercial GIS software package. Preliminary experiment results have revealed that the newly created buffering prototype can generate workspaces in any geometric shapes and detect the space-solid and space-space conflicts in an efficient manner.