Visual modeling and simulation for construction operations

Simulation practitioners in construction often experience difficulties in developing simulation models, i.e., tediousness and error-proneness. The visual environment presented in this paper gives users user-friendly support throughout the entire simulation development process, with the provision of a visual modeling interface, easy-to-use icon animation, and dynamic statistics. Under the visual modeling interface, modeling construction operations is completed through editing activity-based graphics as the standard graphic editing tools do, and no programming is required. An easy-to-use animation can facilitate communication between the simulation model and users, and assist users in verification and validation of the simulation model. Instead of creating 3-D images with adequate skills and much time, this animation takes the graphic simulation model as the background images and the pre-created 2-D iconic images as moving objects, in order that the preparing for animation is simple.