Safe and efficient crane operations play a significant role in successful delivery of construction projects, and thus meticulous planning of crane lifts becomes increasingly critical. Crane lift planning involves a series of complex decisions to be made, while satisfying a wide range of criteria and constraints. Conventionally, making these decisions is time-consuming and to a large extent relies on the planner’s experience. To make more informed and optimized planning decisions, past research works investigated various automated planning techniques and optimization algorithms. However, most studies focus on an individual planning decision or a particular lifting scenario, which makes the findings hard to be generalized. Thus, the knowledge in lift planning is rather fragmented and the state-of-the-art in lift planning is not explicitly presented. This study, therefore, aims to conduct a critical review and assessment on the literature on crane lift planning automation and optimization and to establish a solid foundation to inform future research. It first presents an overview of the literature in crane lift planning with respect to the planning decision and the type of cranes the studies focus on. Secondly, for each lift planning decision, the assumptions, objectives, decision variables, and constraints are formulated based on the literature and analyzed from the perspectives of problem formulation coherence. Furthermore, each problem-solving method is evaluated with regard to a tri-axial evaluation diagram to allow an in-depth discussion on the efficacy and practicality of planning results. Finally, based on the discussion and existing literature, a BIM-based lift planning framework is presented and future research directions are recommended to further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of lift planning practice.

安全高效的起重机操作在成功交付建筑项目方面发挥着重要作用，因此对起重机升降机进行细致的规划变得越来越重要。起重机升降机规划涉及一系列复杂的决策，同时满足广泛的标准和约束条件。传统上，做出这些决定非常耗时，并且在很大程度上依赖于规划者的经验。为了做出更明智和优化的规划决策，过去的研究工作调查了各种自动化规划技术和优化算法。然而，大多数研究都集中在个人规划决策或特定的提升场景上，这使得研究结果难以一概而论。因此，电梯规划中的知识相当分散，并且没有明确呈现电梯规划的最新技术。因此，本研究旨在对起重机升降机规划自动化和优化的文献进行批判性审查和评估，并为未来的研究奠定坚实的基础。它首先概述了起重机升降机规划中关于规划决策和研究重点的起重机类型的文献。其次，对于每个电梯规划决策，根据文献制定假设、目标、决策变量和约束条件，并从问题制定连贯性的角度进行分析。此外，每种解决问题的方法都根据三轴评估图进行评估，以便深入讨论规划结果的有效性和实用性。最后，根据讨论和现有文献，