A specialized information schema for production planning and control of road construction

Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the IFC information schema are well developed to suit building construction projects. Not only do they represent the building as a designed product, they can also be used to support Lean production planning and control. Road construction, a sub-type of civil infrastructure construction, is fundamentally different to building construction, in terms of its products, the types of work and operations, and the resources used. One of the key differences from the point of view of production flow, is that roads are composed of geometrically continuous courses rather than discrete ‘products’, making work packaging difficult. We propose a product schema which models road sections with distinct road course segments that are dynamically defined aggregations of roadels (fine-grained vertical triangular prism objects). The schema represents the continuous nature of road construction. Its discrete entities also enable computations of as-made work using the raw data obtained from sensors and surveys, thus enabling systematic analysis not only of machine productivity and utilization rates, but also of Lean production flow metrics. Finally, we demonstrate how the proposed schema can be implemented with existing IFC entities, but conclude that extending the schema with new entities is preferable for both semantic and practical reasons.