BIM-based construction waste estimation algorithms for institutional projects

Crucial part of the estimation of construction waste (CW) is a reliable quantification of the amounts of materials needed for building construction. In this research the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) is proposed as a solution for retrieving project data effectively for CW estimation purposes. Two algorithms that were developed to quantify concrete and drywall waste are presented to demonstrate a proposed CW estimation methodology. The main idea of this methodology is that the portion of materials purchased that are not needed to be incorporated into the actual structure are considered waste. The amounts of materials purchased are available on general contractors purchasing records and amounts of materials needed for construction are retrieved from BIM models. This research uses the BIM model of a recently completed institutional building as a testbed to perform the waste estimation. The validation of the proposed algorithms is performed by comparing the estimated waste to actual waste data from the project. Furthermore, numbers found on the literature are used to validate these estimations. This study is part of a larger ongoing project that seeks to develop algorithms for the estimation of the major CW streams and implement them to enable a fully automated estimation