4D Automatic Scheduling in High-Tech Facility Construction

High-Tech industry develops rapidly in Taiwan. Due to the highly competitive market and the characteristic of short life-cycles in high-tech semiconductor products, high-tech facility construction must be promoted to adapt the trend. Quality management and schedule management become highly focused in a high-tech facility construction project. Building information modeling (BIM) is a tool that has well performance in integrating construction information. As a result, intensifying BIM applications in high-tech facility must have a great improvement in schedule management in construction site. Schedule and 3D CAD are two critical factors in 4D. However, schedule management and 3D CAD are still hard to integrate in current method. Planning construction schedule and drawing 3D CAD are two separated works. As a result, there is a linking process between 3D CAD and schedule. Integrating 3D model and schedule becomes the critical issue to improve the efficiency of 4D. The goal of this research is to develop a BIM-based automatic scheduling method and apply it on high-tech facility construction. The study first exported the information of high-tech facility objects from 3D model. The 4D automatic scheduling program calculated the duration and arranged the sequence of the objects according to the data in Resource Model and Action Model. Then, the program came up with a project schedule under the resource constraint. Project managers could check the result through the 4D faster than before and formulate the strategy. At last, the study used NTUEE 7-5 Nano Lab as a case study to demonstrate the methodology. This study presents a BIM-based automatic scheduling method that employs 3D objects to generate information required for project scheduling to deal with the complexity of high-tech facility construction and assist construction project managers in making appropriate decisions.