Construction workspace management within an Industry Foundation Class-Compliant 4D tool M. Kassem ⁎, N. Dawood 1 , R. Chavada Technology Futures Institute, School of Science and Engineering, Teesside University, TS1 3BA Middlesbrough, UK abstract article info Article history: Received 23 August 2014 Received in revised form 22 December 2014 Accepted 22 February 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: 4D planning Industry Foundation Class (IFC) Conflict Workspace management Workspaces on construction sites represent a key resource due to their limited availability and impact on work progress and safety. The augmentation of traditional scheduling techniques (e.g., CPM, PERT) with both visualisation and new capabilities to address emerging challenges such as workspace management attracted a significant interest in recent years. Studies in this area addressed individual processes of workspace management such as workspace modelling and allocation and spatial conflict detection and resolution and were often performed in non-4D environments. This research presents the results from the development and evaluation of a methodology and an Industry Foundation Class (IFC) compliant 4D tool for workspace management. The methodology and the tool provide a holistic solution to the approach of workspace management through the allocation of workspaces to site activities, the detection of congestion, spatial and temporal conflicts and their res- olution within a 4D environment in an interactive real-time manner, aided with analytic data from a centralised database. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The workspaces, required to execute activities on site, are a main re- source that affects the efficient and safe delivery of construction projects [7,23]. Site workspaces have become more and more critical in recent years as evidenced by the emergence of new business models where logistics companies with space buffers are contracted to free site space capacity, especially for construction projects conducted in and around large and busy cities [16]. The management of site workspaces is challenging for several reasons. First, the locations and volumes of these workspaces change in three dimensions and across time, accord- ing to project-specific design and schedule information [1]. Second, con- struction activities on site are usually performed by multiple trades, who require, at any point in time, different types of workspaces such as working areas, material storage, equipment, and support infrastruc- tures. This often results in spatial–temporal conflicts where two concur- rent activities conducted by the same trade or by two different trades compete for the same workspace resulting in project delay or causing a safety hazard. Finally, traditional construction scheduling techniques such as Gantt charts and network diagrams are inadequate for manag- ing site workspaces due to their lack of spatial representation [5,8,9, 17,33]. Spatial–temporal conflicts are acknowledged as a major cause of productivity loss [20,32]. Early studies addressing the challenges of workspace management go back to almost two decades [30]. However, only in recent years, this area has attracted a remarkable interest as evidenced by the number of publications (see Table 1) proposing frame- works and tools for construction workspace management with visual and object-oriented features. This is justified by the general industry in- clination to adopt Building Information Modelling (BIM) approaches and technologies and the availability of interoperability standards such IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) and their views for the exchange of project information between different uses. Also, the emergence of commercial 4D visual planning tools (e.g. Autodesk Navisworks, Synchro), which lack workspace management capabilities, formed an additional instigating driver to address this challenge. In this paper, we present an integrated approach for workspace management. Workspace management is referred to as the process of generating and allocating workspaces and their linking to schedule activities, the detection of congestion and spatial–temporal conflicts be- tween workspaces, and the resolution of identified conflicts. All these processes are integrated and enabled within an IFC-compliant 4D tool. First, we review related studies and compare them systematically against a selected set of requirements (e.g. the environment for 3D mark-up of workspace - 3D, 4D, IFC compliant, the integration with scheduling tools - CPM, Gantt Chart) and their coverage of the different processes of workspace management. Second, we present our integrat- ed approach and prototype for workspace management. Finally, we report the results from evaluating the developed prototype on a real world case study. Automation in Construction 52 (2015) 42–58 ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 1642 738300. E-mail addresses: m.kassem@tees.ac.uk (M. Kassem), n.n.dawood@tees.ac.uk (N. Dawood), dr.rajiv.chavada@gmail.com (R. Chavada). 1 Tel.: +44 1642 3424494. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2015.02.008 0926-5805/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Automation in Construction journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/autcon