Towards sustainable construction: BIM-enabled design and planning of roof sheathing installation for prefabricated buildings

Off-site construction and building information model (BIM) technology bring benefits to the construction industry in many respects, such as reduced material waste, and lead to solutions towards sustainable construction. Nevertheless, despite the uptake of off-site construction methods and BIM, massive construction waste in terms of sheathing material (e.g., oriented strand board) is still yielded in the light-frame building industry. This research thus presents an automated BIM-based approach to reducing sheathing material waste by enabling a proactive design and planning of roof sheathing installation for prefabricated buildings. Specifically, a BIM-based sheathing layout design algorithm, which incorporates trades know-how, is developed to achieve the construction design automation. A hybrid algorithm integrating greedy algorithm and particle swarm algorithm is applied in connection with the design algorithm to optimize material cutting plans for the generated layout with the objective of minimizing sheathing material waste. Two case studies are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of roof sheathing material waste reduction. The results are summarized to provide deeper insights in terms of sheathing waste reduction for more sustainable construction practice.