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Featured Application: The proposed approach can potentially become one of path finding applications or add-ins of Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools. This application utilizes detailed daily or weekly construction plans to generate all possible evacuation paths of crews. Spatial movements of workers and equipment should be carefully planned according to project plans. In particular, it is crucial for workers' safety to prepare emergency evacuation paths according to changing construction site configurations and construction progress. However, creating evacuation paths for all crews for each day can be an extremely labor-intensive task if it is done manually. Consequently, in most construction projects, evacuation plans are not provided to managers and crews throughout the entire construction. Even state-of-the-art technologies do not suggest ways to generate evacuation paths according to changing progresses presented in 4-Dimensional Building Information Model (4D BIM). This research proposes a framework to automatically analyze, generate, and visualize the evacuation paths of multiple crews in 4D BIM, considering construction activities and site conditions at the specific project schedule. This research develops a prototype that enables users to define parameters for pathfinding, such as workspaces, material storage areas, and temporary structures to automatically identify the accessible evacuation paths. This prototype shows the secured evacuation paths in the 4D BIM environment and allows the users to organize the automatically generated evacuation paths. A case study using the BIM model of a real construction project involved in this paper demonstrates the potential of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scaffolds are frequently used in construction projects and significantly impact safety and productivity. However, in many construction projects, the decisions on scaffolds are often made without thorough spatiotemporal analyses considering the impact of the scaffolds on safety. Even with the recent advancements in building information modeling (BIM), potential safety hazards related to scaffolds are manually identified, and a handful of plans for scaffolds are then created and analyzed. To reduce the manual efforts and potential human errors, there is a need for innovation that assists in the decision-making for creating safe plans for scaffolds. This paper introduces a decision-making framework for scaffolding, which creates safe scaffolding plans without excessive manual effort and sacrifice of other important construction goals, such as cost and duration. The developed framework automatically generates multiple scaffolding plans and quantitatively evaluates them regarding safety, cost, and duration. The framework was implemented in a BIM software tool and validated with a real-world construction project. The test results demonstrate that the proposed framework can assist users to efficiently minimize safety risks associated with scaffolding without compromising construction workflow efficiency, cost, and duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]