Dynamic Prototyping: The United States Air Force Building Information Modeling Initiative

Abstract

While the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) conducted two pilot Building Information Modeling (BIM) designs in 2005, published their BIM Roadmap in 2006, and hopes to be “fully BIM capable” by 2012, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) has only recently (Fall 2008) embarked on their BIM journey. Indeed, the USAF was much later than the USACE in promulgating their support of BIM, but their delay has the benefit of increased industry BIM knowledge and awareness. Consequently, the USAF initiative has the possibility of greater immediate Return on Investment (ROI) than the Army’s BIM initiative. This research assessed BIM’s impact on the design and construction phase of the two Army Corps of Engineers pilot construction projects and compared that to the USAF BIM approach based on Dynamic Prototyping. By establishing baseline data according to the Unified Facility Criteria (UFC) standard use category codes used across the Department of Defense, these BIM-based projects were evaluated for statistically significant performance differences compared to recent projects of similar use according to three metrics. These three metrics were cost growth, schedule growth, and construction timeline growth. After evaluating the data it was determined that all the BIM-based projects analyzed experienced statistically significant differences in their productivity metrics compared to recently constructed projects of the same type that have similar use. However, there was no significant trend in either positive or negative performance in the construction phase.