An Automated Approach for Procurement of Construction Material Suppliers using BIM-Based Search Engine

Abstract

Construction Procurement Management involves acquiring the services, materials, and equipment necessary to complete a construction project within minimum possible cost and time as per client’s requirement. Clients hire special contractors, subcontractors, and material suppliers for the purpose. Traditionally material suppliers are hired using past experience of main contractors. Such practices involve long and tedious planning, negotiations, calculations, documentations, and approvals. These methods are highly prone to errors, miscalculations, change orders, conflicts, disputes, corruption, and in cooperation, eventually leading to wastage of money, time, and quality of the whole project. With the advent of technology, these drawbacks are targeted to be minimized using various advanced and automated techniques. These techniques involve web services, design, and procurement software, and advanced mathematical systems for dealing procurement issues. Construction material supplier selection is addressed in separate studies using web services, design specifications and Multi-Criteria DecisionMaking (MCDM) to efficiently perform electronic procurement services. However, researchers have mentioned issues and gaps in these methods. In this research, Building Information Modelling (BIM) is utilized as a central system for acquiring material requirements from design, automating web search for suppliers, and performing MCDM for evaluation of the suppliers. An end-to-end automated system is developed to minimize the drawbacks in construction supplier procurement and supply chain management. This system is validated from construction field experts, and results have shown an appreciable minimization in construction procurement issues. Keywords: Construction Procurement Management, Building Information Modelling (BIM), Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM), Web Crawling, Search Engine, Supply Chain Management.