Virtual experiment of innovative construction operations

The planning of construction operations is a complicated activity involving abstraction of construction activities from the drawings, choosing of suitable plants and falseworks, allocation of resources on site, planning of safe working place for labourers, and the scheduling of activities sequence. The increasing competition among contractors demands them to adopt innovative construction methods, which have not been used or tested previously. It is not until the beginning of actual construction that the construction planner can realize the validity of his construction operations planning. The lack of tools for the construction planner to evaluate and validate his planning can result in incorrect construction plans, which cause a lot of rework in the construction phase. Virtual Reality (VR) technology, on the other hand, is very likely to provide a solution to the above problem. VR system generates virtual environment containing objects with real world properties and allows user/planner to interact with the objects. This paper proposes an integrated VR system that generates near to reality construction environment for the construction planner to perform construction activities in a real world manner in order to plan, evaluate and validate the construction operations.