An integrated approach for managing cladding construction in high-rise buildings

The cladding for high-rise office buildings, often in panel form, has gained increasing popularity in the past two decades. Due to the large number of the cladding panels and brackets and their types, the in-batch arrival of the materials in the warehouse and the delivery from the warehouse to the construction site, it is a rather complex and tedious work to manage cladding construction up to now. This study focuses on developing an integrated approach to facilitating efficient and effective management of cladding construction. According to the approach, two application programs are developed for the construction site management and the warehouse control, respectively, and integrated with e-mail software to form a system. By the system, the cladding materials are identified semi-automatically from the shop drawing files and their attributes such as position and arrival state are stored in a relational database in the construction site. The arrival information of the materials is input or imported and stored in a relational database in the warehouse and the incremental part of the information in the database is sent through e-mail to the construction site management to update the database in the construction site. A prototype system has been developed and it was verified through a large building project. The approach was proved to be more practical, efficient and effective than the current practice.