Abstract
Building information modeling (BIM) is transforming the way of work across the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, where BIM offers vast opportunities for improving performance. BIM is therefore an area of great interest across the AEC industry in general and for the structural engineering field in particular. This paper is aimed at providing a broad picture of published papers that relate BIM with structural engineering. This overview will enhance understanding of the state of the research work on this subject, drawing upon bibliometric analysis of 369 papers. Findings provide an updated picture of how now‐available studies that link BIM developments and applications in structural engineering are distributed chronologically, across journals, authors, countries, and institutions. Detailed analyses of citation networks present the cooccurrence map of keywords, citation patterns of journals and articles, the most cited journals, and the top 15 most cited articles on BIM in the area of structural engineering. Discussions demonstrate that research on BIM applications for structural engineering has been constantly growing with a sudden increase after 2014. This study reveals that research attempts on this area have been dominated by exploring generic issues of BIM like information management; however, technical issues of structural engineering, to be resolved through BIM capabilities, have remained overlooked. Moreover, the research work in this area is found to be conducted largely in isolation, comprising disjointed and fragmented research studies. Gaps and important areas for future research include modeling of structural components, automation of the assembly sequence, planning and optimization of off‐site construction, and dynamic structural health monitoring.
Highlights
Building information modeling (BIM) is becoming increasingly popular in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector [1,2,3]; research shows that BIM has the potential to make changes to the way the AEC industry operates [4, 5]
Within the civil engineering field, a review run on the BIM literature reveals that some publications like that of Hunt [27] and Bartley [12] have promoted the benefits of BIM for structural engineers
As asserted by Markoulli et al [30], manual reviews provide a picture of the “trees” but fail in offering a broad overview of the “forest.” Since this paper is aimed at providing a broad picture of published academic papers that relate BIM with structural engineering, authors have not applied the content analysis technique for all papers in search results but have analyzed the content of the papers qualitatively
Summary
Building information modeling (BIM) is becoming increasingly popular in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector [1,2,3]; research shows that BIM has the potential to make changes to the way the AEC industry operates [4, 5]. Synthesizing the existing literature to raise awareness of the state of affairs of research and spot the gaps to be addressed by future studies is, an essential step in advancing the body of knowledge of any field of the study [9, 23]. With the above in mind, this study is targeted at conducting a scientific literature review through a bibliometric analysis of BIM papers related to structural engineering published between 2003 and 2018 (both included). (1) e knowledge composition of BIM in structural engineering in the analyzed 16-year period (2) Most recent studies and trends of applying the BIM methodology in structural engineering (3) Dominant research topics on BIM-related applications in structural engineering (4) Identifying gaps and defining future areas of research on the topic e remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides a background on potential advantages and benefits of BIM for structural engineers.
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