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Construction director: 4D simulation system for plant construction

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 CONSTRUCTION DIRECTOR: 4D SIMULATION SYSTEM
FOR PLANT CONSTRUCTION

Shang-Hsien Hsieh 1 , Chuin-Shan Chen 2 , Yuan-Fu Liao 3 , Cheng-Tao Yang 4 , and I-Chen Wu 5

ABSTRACT: With rapid advancement of information technology, increasingly better tools, especially
4D simulation (or 4D CAD) tools, have been developed for engineers to manage the coordination
complexity involved in plant construction. The 4D simulation tools integrate both the 3D modeling
and scheduling information to assist engineers in visual preview of the construction process and
coordination. Although several powerful 4D simulation tools are available in the commercial market,
they are general-purpose tools and may not be easily adopted and customized to satisfy a specific
consulting or construction company’s needs. In this paper, the design and implementation of a 4D
construction simulation system, called Construction Director, are discussed. Construction Director is
developed under a collaborative project between the CTCI Corporation and National Taiwan
University. It is designed to provide user-friendly interfaces and functionalities to ease the user’s task
in defining the binding between the objects of the 3D plant model and the activity items in the
construction schedule. Its implementation takes full advantage of the visualization and 3D object
manipulation capabilities of Intergraph’s SmartPlant Review software. In addition, a portion of a real
plant construction example is used to demonstrate the applicability of Construction Director.

KEYWORDS: 4D simulation, 4D CAD, Plant construction, Construction plan review

1 INTRODUCTION

Plant construction projects usually involve coordination complexity among many engineering fields,
such as civil engineering, pipe engineering, equipment engineering, HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and
Air Conditioning) engineering, etc. In the past decade, the 4D simulation (or 4D CAD) technology,
which binds 3D models with their corresponding construction schedules in its simplest form, has
emerged rapidly to provide engineers an effective tool for managing the coordination complexity,
especially conflicts, before the actual construction starts. The rapid emergence of the 4D simulation
technology is not only driven by rapid advancement of information technology but also by the
increasing recognition from the construction industry on the benefits of using the 4D CAD
applications for increased productivity, improved project coordination, and optimized on-site
resources. Research at Stanford University estimated that 4D CAD could help avoid up to 45 percent
of change costs, leading to a minimum of 4 to 6 percent overall project cost savings [1]. Because
construction projects can cost billions of dollars, these savings become quite significant.

The benefits of using a 4D simulation tool to improve project coordination among all participants
involved in a plant construction have also been well recognized by the CTCI Corporation (CTCI),
which is one of the largest integrated engineering and construction firms in Taiwan. CTCI not only has
1
Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
2
Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
3
Assistant Chief Engineer, CTCI Corporation, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
4
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
5
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.

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broad experiences in the planning, design, and construction of the refinery, petrochemical, general
industrial, and power plants throughout the world, but is also active in the fields of environmental
protection, energy, infrastructure, and transportation. Currently CTCI employs mainly Intergraph’s
Plant Design System (PDS) for 3D plant design and construction, and SmartPlant Review (SPR) [2]
for interactively reviewing and analyzing the 3D models of a plant. Although some 4D CAD
simulation capabilities are supported by the ScheduleReview function of the Construction module
offered by SPR as complementary software, CTCI still feels the need for a more user-friendly, flexible,
and intelligent 4D CAD capability on top of the SPR in order to facilitate more efficient and effective
4D simulation and management of plant construction and to allow for better integration with CTCI’s
project resource management systems. Therefore, a two-year collaborative software development
project between CTCI and the Computer-Aided Group in the Department of Civil Engineering at
National Taiwan University was initiated in April 2005 for development of a 4D simulation system,
called Construction Director, to better satisfy CTCI’s needs.

In the rest of this paper, a brief review on the current commercial 4D CAD tools is given and the key
requirements for Construction Director are analyzed in Section 2. Section 3 discusses the design and
implementation of Construction Director. In Section 4, the applicability of Construction Director is
demonstrated using a portion of a real plant construction example. Finally, the conclusions are drawn
in Section 5.

2 KEY REQUIREMENTS FOR CONSTRUCTION DIRECTOR

The realization of 4D simulation technology has been greatly accelerated by availability of several
powerful commercial 4D simulation tools. For example, Bentley’s Navigator is a desktop application
that enables users to visualize, navigate, and interact with 3D models of large, complex facilities. It
can help users to evaluate actual versus planned construction processes and explore alternative
resolutions by integrating detailed 3D models with critical scheduling and planning information [3].
Intergraph’s SmartPlant Review provides a comprehensive visualization environment for interactively
reviewing and analyzing large, complex 3D models of process and power plants. Its Construction
Module includes the ScheduleReview tool that is capable of construction sequencing and can help
analyze the construction process problems, show the construction of specific units in the context of the
overall project schedule, and visualize the project progress on a certain day, or fly through the model
while the construction sequence is displayed [2]. Common Point’s Project 4D [4] has emerged from
the research activities undertaken at the Centre for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) of Stanford
University. It allows users to link components of the 3D model and the schedule together, and then to
see how construction will proceed, so the users can identify potential conflicts and trouble zones in
advance. BALFOUR’s FourDscape [5] allows the user to integrate and analyze multi-dimensional data
flows. It also allows the user to access and visualize data in 3D virtual reality as they change over time.

Although the aforementioned commercial products have powerful functionalities for 4D simulations,
they often can not be easily adopted and customized to satisfy the needs of a specific consulting or
construction company, such as CTCI, because each company has its own software environment for
managing 3D models, scheduling, and other 4D related data. In this work, major system requirements
for the development of Construction Director are identified to better satisfy CTCI’s needs. They are
summarized as follows:
z Binding Between Schedule and 3D Model: The system should provide user-friendly interfaces
for the construction planning engineer to bind the 3D construction objects with the work items in
the construction schedule. Because the plant design tasks performed in PDS are typically divided
among different engineering fields, e.g., structural engineering, piping engineering, etc., the
grouping of the 3D objects resulted from the design process are quite different from that needed for
construction planning in which the construction activities usually play the major roles in grouping
the 3D objects. Therefore, the system should provide multi-criteria object search and grouping

2
 tools for the construction planning engineer to flexibly re-group the 3D objects from the design
phase. For example, the engineer can search 3D objects with combination of specified attribute
values across various design files then group these results in a user-friendly manner.
z Working Together with Project Management Software: The system should be able to
import/export the construction schedule information from/to either Microsoft Project or Primavera
Project Planner (P3), or both. It should also provide some editing capabilities on renaming, adding,
and deleting the schedule items as well as modifying the attributes of schedule items. Two types of
schedule items are needed: activities and work items. An activity is a top-level entity for grouping
work items. Both the activity and work item may contain one or more work items. Only the work
items are linked to the 3D construction objects. The hierarchy of the activities and work items may
be displayed and managed using a tree structure.
z Visualization and Animation of Construction Progression: The system should take full
advantage of SPR’s capabilities to support both automatic animation and user-controlled display of
construction progression within a user-specified period of time. In the animation, a set of colors
should be used to contour 3D model objects with different construction statuses.

3 DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF CONSTRUCTION DIRECTOR

This work employs object-oriented technology for development of Construction Director. The design
of Construction Director takes advantage of several design patterns [6] to achieve good maintainability
and reusability of the system. Figure 1 depicts the basic framework of the system design. The
framework consists of two major parts: the KernelFacade [6] and GUI (Graphic User Interface)
subsystems. The KernelFacade subsystem defines a higher-level and unified interface to the C-Style
SPR API. It also enhances SPR’s searching capability (Search Engine) and drives SPR’s visualization
engine for simulation of construction process (Animation Engine). The GUI subsystem consists of the
Schedule Tree and Models List components. The Schedule Tree component uses a directory tree like
interface to manage the hierarchy and attributes of the activities and work items for a construction
schedule, while the Models List component uses a combination of folder-like and list-like interfaces
for managing 3D construction objects.

Figure 1. Design of Construction Director

The implementation of Construction Director is carried out in the Microsoft .NET (MS.NET)
environment. Although SPR API supports both the Visual Basic and C/C++ programming, the C++
programming language is selected in this work because of efficiency consideration. In addition, MFC

3
(Microsoft Foundation Class Library) is employed for implementation of the graphical user interfaces
of Construction Director.

4 DEMONSTRATION OF CONSTRUCTION DIRECTOR

A 3D model of a chemical plant (as shown in Figure 2) is used as an example to test and demonstrate
Construction Director. The 3D model represents an integration of the designs from several different
engineering divisions at CTCI. It consists of more than twenty-three thousand objects in at least
twelve DGN or PRP files (i.e., PDS’s design files). Therefore, it is not an easy task for the
construction planning engineer to re-group the 3D objects and bind them with the corresponding work
items in the construction schedule. This section demonstrates the functionalities designed in
Construction Director for facilitating the construction planning engineer’s tasks.

Figure 2. Display of the 3D Model of an Example Chemical Plant Using SPR

Figure 3 shows the user interface of Construction Director. The upper side toolbar (as indicated by
Frame A) consists of icons for quick access to a set of tools. The left-hand side window (as indicated
by Frame B) is used to manage the activity tree of a construction schedule, and the middle window (as
indicated by Frame C) serves as a working area to facilitate the 4D binding tasks, while the right-hand
side window (as indicated by Frame D) is used to manage grouping of 3D construction objects.

For managing the activity tree and its work items in Construction Director, the user can create them
and easily adjust the relationships among activities and work items through the drag & drop operations.
If the user double-clicks on an activity or work item, a dialog box is popped up for the user to edit the
attributes of the activity or work item. Also, the user is allowed to export and import the complete or
partial activity tree to and from project management software, such as Microsoft Project or P3,
through the Project XML format.

For binding together the 3D objects and the work items, the user can simply drag & drop a selected 3D
object to the target work item. Even if the work item does not yet exist in the activity tree, the user can
still drag & drop the 3D object to the target activity and the system would automatically create a new
work item under the activity. This feature is particularly helpful when the user wants to drag & drop a

4
group of 3D objects to the target activity for the reason of simplicity and efficiency. In addition, two
different kinds of symbols are employed to indicate if a 3D object has been assigned to a work item
(see Figure 3 for the symbols in the ELEM_NAME column).

Figure 3. The User Interface of Construction Director

Figure 4. Display of Construction Status of 3D objects using varied colors

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 After the binding is completed, Construction Director can be used to animate the construction
progression for a given time interval, as shown in Figure 4. During the animation, the 3D objects in
the plant model are highlighted in different colors depending on their construction statuses. Table 1
shows the color scheme implemented in this work.

Table 1. Color Schemes for Illustrating Different Construction Statuses

Color Construction Status

Pink The construction had been completed before the given time interval

Red It is currently under construction

Yellow The construction has been just completed

Blue The construction has been completed within the given time interval

Orange The construction has not been started yet

5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper has presented the development of a 4D plant construction simulation system, called
Constructor Director. Although the requirement analysis performed in this work focuses mainly on
CTCI’s needs, most of the identified requirements are felt to be essential for general 4D simulation
systems. Significant efforts have been placed on the design of Construction Director to provide user-
friendly graphical interfaces and information manipulation functionalities so that the binding between
the objects of the 3D plant model and the activity items in the construction schedule can be easily
defined. The design also takes full advantage of the object-oriented technology and the engineering
experiences provided by CTCI engineers, while the implementation takes full advantage of the
visualization and 3D object manipulation capabilities of SPR to minimize the development effort. In
this paper, the applicability of Construction Director has been successfully demonstrated using a
portion of a real plant construction example. Further evaluation on Construction Director is currently
being conducted by the CTCI engineers in practical construction projects and further system
enhancement can be expected.

6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The financial support from the CTCI Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like
to thank Mr. Wen-Han Lee of the CTCI Corporation, Mr. Hon-Lin Chi, Mr. Shlan-Jeng Weng and Ms.
Pei-Shiuan He of National Taiwan University for their assistant in the development of Construction
Director.

7 REFERENCES

1. McKinney, K., Kim, J., Fischer, M., and Howard, C., “Interactive 4D-CAD,” Proceedings of the
Third Congress on Computing in Civil Engineering, Anaheim, CA, USA, June 17–19, 1996,
pp.383–389.
2. SmartPlant Review, Intergraph Corporation, http://ppm.intergraph.com/visualization/, April, 2006.
3. Bentley Navigator, Bentley Systems, http://www.bentley.com/, April, 2006.
4. Project 4D, Common Point, http://www.commonpointinc.com/, April, 2006.
5. FourDscape, BALFOUR Technologies, LLC., http://www.bal4.com/, April 2006.
6. Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., and Vlissides, J., Design Patterns, Addison Wesley, 1995.

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