Ontological models for simulation of building construction processes

Abstract

The construction industry has a series of own practices and methods; which specifically depends on either the nature of construction works or the actions of the actors involved in construction activities. This makes evident the need of having tools that facilitate the construction management of projects, one of them: the simulation of construction processes. Thus, this paper presents a conceptualization of constructive operations, as a start-point for the development of a library of objects for the simulation of construction processes in buildings. To do it, fieldwork was conducted to gather information about processes and resources, which were then modeled by using Unified Modeling Language (UML). To validate the conceptualization made, some of the models created were simulated by using Discrete Event Simulation.