Documenting work-in-progress on construction sites using images captured with smartphones, point-and-shoot cameras, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has gained significant popularity among practitioners. The spatial and temporal density of these large-scale site image collections and the availability of 4D Building Information Models (BIM) provide a unique opportunity to develop BIM-driven visual analytics that can quickly and easily detect and visualize construction progress deviations. Building on these emerging sources of information this paper presents a pipeline for model-driven visual analytics of construction progress. It particularly focuses on the following key steps: 1) capturing, transferring, and storing images; 2) BIM-driven analytics to identify performance deviations, and 3) visualizations that enable root-cause assessments on performance deviations. The information requirements, and the challenges and opportunities for improvements in data collection, plan preparations, progress deviation analysis particularly under limited visibility, and transforming identified deviations into performance metrics to enable root-cause assessments are discussed using several real world case studies.
This research is financially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant CPS #1446765. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The technical support of the industry partners in providing access to their sites for data collection and assisting with progress monitoring analytics is also appreciated.