BIM Application for Formwork Measurement

• Main Authors: Tse-Sung Tseng, 曾澤淞
• Other Authors: Su-Ling Fan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9ny444

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 土木工程學系碩士班 === 106 === More than 80% of construction in Taiwan are made of Reinforced Concrete (RC) and Steel Reinforced Concrete (SRC), with approximately 30% of the cost are from the formwork system. This indicates the importance of the formwork system in Taiwan. On one hand, the manual measurement of formwork is tediously repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone. On the other hand, the new object-oriented Building Information Modelling (BIM) process is able to provide the latest quantity of the project elements, including the area of the surface and the points of the locations. However, currently there are lack of specific parameter for formwork in available BIM platforms. Previous studies show that there are lots of integration between BIM and formwork system. Some of the applications involve exporting the geometric size of the elements, and set up the formula in third-party software; while the others rely on strict modelling rules to ensure the efficiency and accuracy of their system. To avoid the complex setting of multi-party software or the strict modelling rules, this research develops a customized system of formwork measurement based on one of the popular BIM platforms, Autodesk’s Revit. The objective of the research described in this paper is to develop the Formwork Measurement application programming interface (API) plug-in to partially automate the formwork quantity measurement. The main challenge of the research is the determination of elements’ valid surface and invalid surface, which is represented by the overlapped surface between elements. This prototype application also includes two functions, one is to calculate the element formwork; another to export the spreadsheet of the element information. A typical building is used as a case study to validate the accuracy of the developed formwork system. The research shows that the proposed approach can partially automate formwork measurement, which significantly improves the current BIM process.