Information requirements for resource planning in residential construction projects - a BIM perspective

The advent of digital engineering environments and Building Information Models (BIM) was envisioned to enhance our ability to plan on-site construction operations. However, the reliance on full-fledged architectural BIMs is at times impractical, especially for the relatively small projects in the residential housing domain, due to the effort required to develop these models. Simpler and more abstract BIMs can still provide value to the automation of site and resource planning approaches. To advance the use of BIM in the Australian residential housing construction, the herein presented research aims to identify the type of information and semantic knowledge requirements needed for on- site resource planning, with a long-term goal of developing abstract BIMs better tailored for managing on-site construction operations. The study adopts both a desk research of the existing literature and semi-structured interviews with domain experts. This paper reports on the outcomes of stage 1, which is desk research and discusses how the identified required information can be mapped onto data structures in IFC-based building information models.