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Introduction
The importance of effective scheduling has become more evident in the last few decades as building construction projects have become increasingly complex (Bryde et al., 2013). Realistic schedules are effective communication tools among project participants, and they can facilitate proper resource allocation, cost estimation, project control and evaluation (Son et al., 2017).
A number of commercial software products have been developed to facilitate project scheduling. They are designed to simplify the scheduling process and eliminate some of the shortcomings of paper-based scheduling methods, such as the difficulties of data transfer, missing hard copies, and manual miscalculations. Most existing software products calculate the schedule and resource histograms using well-known methods, such as the critical path method; however, these methods generally require time-consuming manual preparations (Sigalov and König, 2017; Kim et al., 2013), such as work breakdown structure (WBS) creation and determination of work-packages and their duration, sequences and estimation of required resources. Schedulers must expend time and resources to make schedules for similar and repetitive projects (Chevallier and Russell, 1998), and mistakes can occur as a result of engineers’ miscalculation or improper knowledge application.
The emergence of building information modeling (BIM) has improved building data modeling and data exchange among project participants. BIM is considered one of the most promising technologies in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry because it can be a useful tool during the entire life cycle of a building project, including the planning, design, construction, operation and maintenance stages (Volk et al., 2014). Object-oriented 3D design and simulation, parametric modeling, interoperable building data storage, analysis and exchange are considered the main functionalities of BIM (Miettinen and Paavola, 2014). Thanks to these capabilities, an increasing number of researchers in the construction area have started to apply BIM in project planning. In particular, several research efforts are aimed at linking 3D objects from a building information model with the work-packages in a project schedule, which is called 4D BIM (Wang et al., 2014). In addition to its emerging 4D modeling capabilities, BIM enables planners to transfer building data from the design stage to the planning stage, thereby avoiding possible manual errors. It can also facilitate the tedious work of generating schedules for repetitive projects (Sigalov and König, 2017).