Virtual trail assembly of prefabricated structures based on point cloud and BIM

During the construction of prefabricated structures, manufacturing deviations and assembly deviations will accumulate. By detecting dimensional deviations of precast concrete (PC) components, rework can be avoided. This paper presents a Scan-vs-BIM (Building Information Modeling) method based on point clouds to identify PC components and evaluate manufacturing deviations. Based on Extended Orthogonal Procrustes Analysis (EOPA), a virtual trial assembly (VTA) approach is introduced to quantify cumulative deviation between PC components and the corresponding nominal specifications. The method has been applied to a two-story prefabricated frame, and the obtained results show that the average absolute deviation and standard deviation between the structure and the BIM model were 11.55 mm, and 3.60 mm, respectively. This study presents a solution for predicting the assembly deviation of PC components, and for enhancing the quality of prefabricated structures.