An Ontological Framework for Identification of Construction Resources Using BIM Information

Resources play a very important role in the success of the construction projects. Estimating the required resources such as equipment, material, and labor is a necessary step in the development of construction technical plans. Resources are selected based on the properties of the elements to be constructed, construction method, activities, and tasks and their precedence relations. This paper proposes a BIM-based ontological framework for developing detailed construction method statements for single construction products. The construction method statements are developed based on the product information from BIM and available resources. An ontological approach provides excellent means for this purpose. Ontologies can capture, manage and represent knowledge in a machine-readable format. Moreover, they support consistency checking for and reasoning. We used web ontology language (OWL) for ontology representation and semantic web rule language (SWRL) to express constraint knowledge in the form of rules and provide reasoning capabilities. We pay special attention to detailed definition of project resources and their operational specifications. In the proposed framework, product information from BIM are received and structured in an ontological product model. This approach paves the way for an effective construction planning with details on required resources, based on available resources and their specifications and the specifications of the product and other resources. Through the implementation of the framework to a real construction project, the capabilities of the proposed method are presented.