BIM-based Integrated Framework for Detailed Cost Estimation and Schedule Planning of Construction Projects

With the increasing popularity of Building Information Modeling (BIM), several research studies have focused on its application in the construction industry, and advancements such as developments of BIM-based tools for construction scheduling and cost estimating have been carried out. Nevertheless, these tools are each developed only for one particular aspect of construction management, such as scheduling or cost estimating. As such, most are still limited to the product element level, rather than the construction operation level. This paper thus presents a BIM-based integrated framework for detailed cost estimation and schedule planning of construction projects. In the proposed framework, a BIM product model developed in Autodesk Revit, is integrated with a construction process model retrieved from RS Means, with the objective of generating detailed cost estimation and a workface construction schedule simultaneously. In this paper, the literature pertaining to BIM, cost estimating and scheduling is surveyed; then, the proposed framework is presented, and a simple building project is used as a case study to facilitate understanding of and verify the applicability of the integrated framework. Finally, findings from the implementation of the proposed framework are summarized.