Construction Decision Making using Virtual Reality

Swaroop Ashok, and Clark A Cory
Purdue Univeristy
West Lafayette, Indiana

Decision making is a crucial process for many industries and construction is one of them. Unlike the manufacturing industry where one can make certain decisions regarding an actual product by looking at it in real time, the nature of construction is different. Here, decisions are to be made on a product which will be built somewhere in the near future. According to a study by Assaf and Al-Hejji (2006), one of the main causes of failure in a construction project is due to bad decision making. The complex and interim nature of construction projects along with factors like time essence, increasing scale of projects and multitude of stakeholders are making it even more difficult to reach consensus. With a visual representation, the stakeholders involved can collaborate on a single platform to assess the project, share common knowledge and make choices that would churn out better results in all major aspects like cost, quality, time and safety. The ‘Social collaborative VR system’ framework is used to create a case study scheme to compare participant opinion on utilizing two VR decision making systems. The VR model is exhibited to the participant, exposing them to material changing tools, observe termination details, connections, layouts and Architectural-Structural systems. The study uses a qualitative approach to determine the user opinion. The study can be used in the industry to examine design alternatives and options from the two viewpoints to reduce the need for comprehensive revisions and reach an overall consensus.

The objective of this case study would be to check the effectiveness of VR in making decisions with respect to details like material, texture, paint, layouts, installations, lighting, ceiling, terminations, amongst a few. The VR-design model will be examined to understand the challenges and benefits of the tool and evaluate the performance of immersive and non-immersive platforms. A workable building model is created, deployed using 3D generating software along with a VR engine/plugin and distinctly developed into two platforms: immersive and non-immersive. The participants will be distributed into three groups and exposed to the VR model. To select the participants from the volunteer pool, Purposeful/Selective sampling is used. (This is usually done in qualitative studies, where the researcher recruits’ participants who can provide in-depth information about the phenomenon under investigation). This study will involve graduate student participants who have: (1) completed a formal undergraduate education, (2) have a fair share of knowledge in the field, (3) this allows those with work experience to impart that knowledge into the study

The participant pool is modified to graduate student participants with a study model instead of an ongoing project. This eliminates the sense of urgency for project deliverables, by doing so the participants’ opinions and feedback will be solely on the performance of the tool. A few of the questions have been revised to suit the context and to reduce ambiguity of the user feedback. This research is ongoing and the results are tentative. The researchers aim to generate a result which would help architectural/design/construction firms relate their project to the one studied, identify to the feedback and conclusions of the current participants.The final outcomes of this study would assist the practitioners of this particular sector select a tool that is appropriate for their project and collaboration needs. Construction personnel can also use the outcomes of this study to evaluate their current decision-making tools and consider incorporating VR into their setup.

References:

  • Assaf, S. A., & Al-Hejji, S. (2006). Causes of delay in large construction projects. International journal of project management, 24(4), 349-357.
  • Castronovo, F., Nikolic, D., Liu, Y., & Messner, J. (2013, October). An evaluation of immersive virtual reality systems for design reviews. In Proceedings of the 13th international conference on construction applications of virtual reality (Vol. 47).

Keywords:  Decision making, Construction, and Virtual Reality