Leveraging the Potential of BIM towards Sustainable Construction

Abstract

The need to recognize the importance of sustainable construction is becoming a major concern. The innovative technologies around the construction industry can be of major help to achieve the aim of sustainable construction. There are various diverse sustainability rating frameworks around the world, everyone with the same aim of improving the performance of whole building to achieve the goals of creating a healthy built environment. Integration of data is key to sustainable construction which needs a shift from traditional methods of sharing information among various stakeholders. Nowadays, BIM is emerging as more dominant technology by progressively integrating more and more people of the AEC industry. However, the uninterrupted use of digital data information along the complete process sequence falls notably behind other industry sectors. For a successful construction project, an uninterrupted understanding and widespread exchange of information among these stakeholders is essential. Main role of BIM is to improve the collaboration and communication between various people and phases of construction by integration of exchange of information. BIM process, implemented successfully is able to improve the delivery of information in a project and reduce extra cost incurred due to design changes during subsequent construction phases. In this paper to achieve a sustainable BIM model, the capability to share the information using most popular open source, vendor neutral platform IFC, between two of the most accepted BIM software was investigated. Round trip tests were performed for the IFC models produced in two software and an evaluation is made in terms of geometric distortion, information loss and misrepresentation. Several issues were found in exchanging both object geometry information and other semantically significant data. Complete exchange of geometry was not observed in any of the exchanges. The reason for these imperfections is due to the fact that different software prefer to use methods to generate the information in their internal data schemas.