Recognition of process patterns for BIM-based construction schedules

Construction scheduling is a very demanding and time intensive process. Building information modeling (BIM) is becoming increasingly important for planning and scheduling, as it provides significant support for this difficult assignment. Further improvements can be achieved by applying predefined process templates for BIM-based schedules. It can reduce the planning time and thus increase the productivity. However, a manual definition of proper and application-specific process templates is very challenging. The automatic detection of recurring similar configurations of construction processes, called process patterns, would greatly support this complex task. Identified process patterns can be subsequently generalized, supporting the design of process templates. This contribution presents an overall concept for process pattern recognition in BIM-based construction schedules by applying graph-based methods. Due to the fact that graph matching algorithms are in general very time- and resource-consuming, an indexing technique based on features is used to solve this problem more efficiently. The paper focuses on the estimation of similarity in construction schedules, describing feature-based methods and similarity measure definitions in detail. Another emphasis is the preparation of schedules for the recognition of process patterns, including decomposition of schedules into smaller parts, referred to as subschedules, and normalization of features. The potential of this concept is demonstrated by two different case studies. The proper results of the evaluation show that the proposed method and similarity metrics are sufficient for the recognition of process patterns in construction schedules.