Scaffolds are frequently used in construction projects and significantly impact safety and productivity. However, in many construction projects, the decisions on scaffolds are often made without thorough spatiotemporal analyses considering the impact of the scaffolds on safety. Even with the recent advancements in building information modeling (BIM), potential safety hazards related to scaffolds are manually identified, and a handful of plans for scaffolds are then created and analyzed. To reduce the manual efforts and potential human errors, there is a need for innovation that assists in the decision-making for creating safe plans for scaffolds. This paper introduces a decision-making framework for scaffolding, which creates safe scaffolding plans without excessive manual effort and sacrifice of other important construction goals, such as cost and duration. The developed framework automatically generates multiple scaffolding plans and quantitatively evaluates them regarding safety, cost, and duration. The framework was implemented in a BIM software tool and validated with a real-world construction project. The test results demonstrate that the proposed framework can assist users to efficiently minimize safety risks associated with scaffolding without compromising construction workflow efficiency, cost, and duration.
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