Advantages of Building Information Modeling Technology (BIM) in Structural Design and Construction Stages

Abstract

Building Information Modeling has recently spread worldwide and is commonly used in construction projects. Whereas in Egypt, despite the fact of the increased awareness of the BIM, the actual use of BIM by consultants and contractors remains limited. BIM in Egypt is still in the development phase, and it requires more efforts to become widely used by construction societies. This research studies the effect of applying BIM in the design and construction stages of high-rise buildings, and how it increases the quality of co-ordinations between all disciplines, which affects directly the productivity of construction projects in high rise building. This research tries to find the ideal usage of BIM in the design and construction stages and to find out how the direct application of BIM in selecting structural design. The methodology used for this research approach depends on a detailed literature review, a field survey for the building information modeling in Egyptian construction field as it is intended to use the questionnaire answers from a group of engineers that used the technology and followed by statistical analysis of the collected responses to the questionnaire. The obtained results showed that using BIM technology in high rise buildings projects can increase the productivity and provided a high level of visualization that could be missed by traditional design methods. The term “build before you build” best describes how digital prototyping with BIM was used to test the design. It provided the opportunity to explore different options with the client.