Building Information Modeling BIM Research Articles

Application of BIM + VR Technology in Highway Design and Construction

The application of building information modeling BIM and virtual reality VR has become increasingly popular in highway design and construction aiming to improve the efficiency and quality of design and construction. BIM and VR technology enable the digital management of expressway design and construction facilitating a visual interactive and immersive operational experience. Using a highway construction project as a case study this paper illustrates the specific application of BIM + VR technology in highway design and construction. This provides digital intelligent and efficient solutions for highway construction ultimately enhancing the quality and efficiency of the design and construction processes.

Legal barriers and associated solutions of BIM implementation in the Egyptian AEC industry

Adopting building information modelling BIM results in a faster and more effective process from planning to closeout. However, BIM remains a new and unadopted process in most countries, and where it is adopted, the lack of knowledge in addition to multiple barriers hinder the full adoption of such technology. The research aims to explore the barriers of BIM adoption, with a special focus on legal and contractual barriers in the Egyptian industry. First, the legal barriers are identified from the literature, second, offered solutions as per FIDIC, NEC ConsensusDocs, and CIC BIM protocol are identified. Third the Egyptian BIM code is studied and compared against the international forms to identify the gaps in the Egyptian BIM code. The impact of the identified barriers and solutions are then measured and ranked in the Egyptian AEC industry through a questionnaire that was developed and was later validated through a case study where different stakeholders in a specific Egyptian project utilizing BIM were interviewed to fill the gaps in the Egyptian BIM code.

Challenges under Collapse of Building in Nigeria and Way to Improve It

Abstract: Building collapse in Nigeria is alarming and indeed has become a subject of great concern. For the past 10 years an overwhelming number of buildings have collapsed in Nigerian rural and urban cities, with about 77% rise from the previous decade. The incidence of building failures and collapses has become major issues of concern in the development of Nigeria as the losses in terms of lives and properties are now becoming very alarming. This study provides critical reasoning and contributions regarding structural failures observed in Nigeria. To address this problem, The study aimed at exploring major causes of building collapse in Nigeria with a view of establishing effective way of solving the problem. The primary data that will be used if from the Questionnaires and field observations while secondary data will be obtained from textbooks, newspapers and Journal articles . This significant of this paper is to use building information modeling BIM to improve full project visualization, reduced construction collapse, cost, increased productivity, safer construction, better building and information analysis. Keywords: Building Information Modelling, construction, industry, management project.

How Different Tools Contribute to Climate Change Mitigation in a Circular Building Environment?—A Systematic Literature Review

The circular economy (CE) has become a trend because concern has arisen regarding the end of life of several products and the reduction of CO2 emissions in many processes. Since the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is one of the biggest generators of environmental impacts, there is a need to apply the CE concept to the industry in order to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, the role of different tools that are used to integrate CE strategies to reduce GHG emissions by the AEC industry is still unknown in the scientific literature. The purpose of this paper is to carry out a systematic literature review on the theme and analyze the following seven tools: (1) life cycle assessment—LCA; (2) building information modeling—BIM; (3) building environmental certifications—BEC; (4) building materials passports—BMP; (5) waste management plan—WMP; (6) augmented reality—AR; and (7) virtual reality—VR. A total of 30 papers were reviewed, and it was observed that, in terms of CE strategies and climate change mitigation, the vast majority can be classified as closing loops and are mainly related to recycling and reuse at the end of life and the use of recycled materials. Considering the building’s stakeholders, constructors, researchers, and designers can be the main users and, consequently, those that most benefit from the use of the evaluated tools. The integration between LCA, BIM, and BMP was also observed. Finally, as one of the main contributions of this research, other types of integration among the analyzed tools are proposed. These proposals seek to improve and update the tools and also address the need to reduce GHG emissions.

Framework proposal for BIM implementation in Brazilian construction and development companies

PurposeThis study proposes a framework for collaborative building information modeling BIM implementation in construction and development companies in the Brazilian architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) market. The study addresses aspects concerning BIM collaboration, levels of adoption and maturity, classification of BIM objects and use of tools.Design/methodology/approachThe study conclusions are based on a bibliographic review and on active participation in a BIM implementation process conducted with two construction and development companies that participated in the study, which allowed examining the practical problems of the elaboration of BIM in various technical specialties, and the proposition of a framework to help overcome these limitations.FindingsThe research identified the importance of adopting standardized methods to develop models, establishing common classifications for objects to allow the use by different stakeholders on 3D, 4D and 5D processes, in a context that information is scattered and, in many cases, divergent across different companies and even different areas from the same company.Originality/valueThe study presents a practical set of methods and tools to be used within a context common to the Brazilian AEC market, on which construction and development companies are responsible for the management of the design and construction phase of a building. The recommendations of the research take into account the shortage of nationwide frameworks and classification standards, so it contributes to filling some gaps of current literature that cover theoretical aspects of guidance documents for BIM implementation but do not detail specific practical applications within a determined context. The limitations of the framework proposed are its focus on establishing context-specific guidelines, which may not be suitable universally.

Application of 4D BIM in Construction Industry: Challenges and Suggestions

Abstract: Construction industry is believed to be one of the most criticized industries worldwide. During the last two decades, this criticism has denoted a lot of problems. Without disregarding any of the industry problems, it seems that the most criticized problems are low delivery performance, lack of innovation, lack of collaboration and fragmented nature of the industry. To overcome these problems, a collaborative work environment is needed. During the last few years, the use of advanced information technologies in construction hasincreased to support the industry requirement of collaboration environment. Keywords: Building Information Modeling BIM, BIMimplementation, BIM Barriers

Building Information Modeling BIM as a Development Tool for the Management of Construction Projects

Building Information Modeling BIM as a Development Tool for the Management of Construction Projects

HBIM as a Tool for Branding Historical Egyptian Sites by Utilizing Augmented Reality

Over the ages, Egypt has been known for its flourished history with the ability and the power to fascinate mankind. Its great heritage appears in several forms that include monuments, tombs, temples, and documents revealing past events, but until the beginning of the 21st century only a minimum share of the secrets and the mysteries were exposed. Egypt’s monuments are deteriorated and out of the spot and has been left without maintenance and development. Numerous monuments and historical sites are ignored and not even considered as a destination for tourists because of the absence of virtuous marketing and propaganda. The planning and management of cultural heritage buildings through digital 3D models has become a necessity to protect and conserve the existing history. Building Information Modelling BIM is considered a main tool adopted by the Architecture, Engineering and Construction AEC sector for its qualities and capabilities. Due to the complexity of cultural heritage buildings the concept of Heritage Building Information Modelling (HBIM) which concerns the modelling, documentation, and virtualizing the heritage. This research will focus on the use of HBIM technology by implementing augmented reality mobile application to upgrade the quality of branding of historical sites in Egypt. The AR will augment Al-Baron Palace, which is the chosen case study. The methodology adopted is literature review, comparative analysis on international case studies of sites that applied augmented reality, and an experiment followed by a questionnaire answered by users to evaluate the usage of such mobile application. The research will conclude with a framework that will provide guidelines for applying augmented reality technology system in order to enhance and promote Egypt’s heritage.

Maintenance Management for Public Buildings Using Building Information Modeling BIM

Building maintenance is gaining an increasing attention in the various fields of scientific research and there was a need for the use of new technologies in maintenance management, as the facility management deal with a large amount of information relating to maintenance, which includes drawings and specifications, lists, and reports, and the use of paper files leads to decrease the efficiency and create a shortage of data and information. The authors offer in this research tool to manage the maintenance process by using the BIM through linking deterioration models and three-dimensional model of the facility to be maintained and compensate the external investigation data for maintenance work in these models to get at the end of this research and with the help of the possibilities offered by Revit database to an upcoming maintenance items and arrange them according to their importance and impact on the facility and the estimated budget for the periodic maintenance and distribution of this budget on the various construction elements and the development of resources plan for next year.

Revitalizing Cultural Heritage Through Building Information Modeling (BIM)

The paper will discuss using Building Information Modelling BIM as an efficient tool of conservation and museums management, specifically in revitalizing the museum of Islamic arts in Cairo after it had been attacked by terrorists as this museum was conserved before and opened to the public 2010, case study method of research chosen to highlight the most important way to deal with heritage at crisis time when every minute differ in saving an object or the saving the building itself, the project was done as a fast track project, as it depended on BIM to achieve the three aspects of good project management which are time, cost and quality. From the research findings that using BIM can save time of implementation and technical documents producing up to 20% of the time needed for the same scope, so it compare between 2010 and 2014 versions of management to observe what is the impact of using BIM on the revitalization of the museum.

Semantic Enrichment for Building Information Modeling

Significant difficulties remain in exchanging information between building information modeling BIM tools. The industry foundation classes IFC exchange schema is too generic to capture the full sem...

Advocating a Renewed Culture of Surveying Education

In recent years torrents of ink have been spent describing the pros and cons of removing the field of surveying education from the umbrella of engineering or, more precisely, civil engineering. For a time, the uproar was so loud and incessant that an orchestrated effort by professional associations—none affiliated with the American Society of Civil Engineers ASCE —successfully decreased the career academic standards for surveyors, which have continued to degenerate in the confusing impasse that we are confronting now. This impromptu ill-advised movement brought about the beliefs that the original Engineering Accreditation Commission of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology—ABET EAC —was too scientifically advanced and rigorous in their curriculum requirements and that the creation of new accreditations, more technological and applied in scope, were necessary. Accordingly, we witnessed the birth of less stringent and more permissive educational certifications such as the ABET ASAC , accredited by the Applied Science Accreditation Commission. Was this a wise move? In retrospect, and restricting ourselves to the surveying profession, the answer is probably no. It is becoming perfectly clear that many of the revolutionary measuring technologies sprouting profusely these days are more in tune with the surveying engineering field than with the land surveying field. I am specifically referring to novel and broadly based scientific realms such as Global Navigation Satellite Systems GNSS , inertial navigation systems INS , terrestrial and airborne LiDAR Light Detection and Ranging , laser tracking and sophisticated terrestrial scanning devices, building information modeling BIM , and digital photogrammetry. Do these topics belong in the curriculum of a two-year technology program? The answer is an emphatic no! This limited amount of time gives opportunity to learn the subjects only superficially.—Knowing how to sequentially press instrument keys is not exactly what a professional surveying engineer should be primarily concerned with. Could we draw a time line and start again, practically from scratch, with our expectations focused on the coming decades? In my humble opinion we are compelled to scientifically invigorate the surveying engineering profession for the benefit of future generations of certified professionals. It is imperative that all states require, besides pertinent experience, a minimum of a four-year college degree in surveying engineering before a license is granted. Why emphasize surveying engineering? Because with the exception of boundary location procedures, all surveying specializations have historically been closely intertwined with civil engineering, e.g., road and highway layouts, structural deforma-

Closure to “Areas of Application for 3D and 4D Models on Construction Projects” by Timo Hartmann, Ju Gao, and Martin Fischer

The authors provide a good categorization framework for application areas for 3D and 4D models in construction practices. It will be helpful for the practitioners in finding the most beneficial applications of 3D and 4D models on their projects and also for the researchers in identifying the most promising areas of research. The authors have already explored different possible areas of applications and research; however, the objective of this discussion is to make some additional observations about a few issues related to future research areas for 3D and 4D models. The discusser feels that more points may be incorporated in future studies in order to help readers better understand the authors’ observations. Although 3D computer-aided drafting CAD models are strong visualization tools, they consist of points, lines, polygons, and solids with no topology and no link to a database. As mentioned in the paper, there is a major revolution of building information modeling BIM in the CAD world. BIM is a kind of 3D modeling that includes topology and may be linked with a database. It is a full building life cycle management tool from construction to day-to-day operations to ultimate demolition. The authors mentioned that 3D/4D models, as well as BIM, need to be researched to determine their future use in different applications areas. In the discusser’s opinion, it would have been better if the authors had specified that 3D CAD and 4D modeling should be researched for application in 3D topology, or the industry needs the integration of BIM with 4D tools, or researchers should study the application of 4D tools during the project life cycle as mentioned in the paper , or the 3D and 4D modeling capabilities of BIM should be enhanced. The 4D models require application-level integration to fulfill project requirements such as quantity takeoffs, cost estimation, energy simulations, etc. Hence, software from various disciplines is being used to fulfill such requirements. Architects, engineers, builders, owners, and operators face challenges because different information formats are used to represent the graphical and nongraphical information for a project and this data is difficult to consolidate Isikdag et al. 2008 . During the planning process when using 4D models, planners have to repeatedly reorganize, interpret, and combine the information collected from different software. This process is tedious and frequently produces errors. Therefore, lack of interoperability is a major obstacle to effectively combining information from different sources. BIM provides solutions for overcoming the interoperability problems that

From Hemlock to Hard-Drive

The continuation of human civilization is dependent upon learning. We each arrive ignorant, and what knowledge we travel with is determined by what we manage to pick up on the way. The quantity of academic research currently being conducted in relation to the learning process is a heartening testament to the importance that society still accords the acquisition of knowledge and skills. This special issue contributes to that corpus in the particular context of construction law. The contributors each attack the common problem—how to enhance law learning—from a different angle. A reinterpretation of the 2,500-year-old Socratic method is proposed by one. The exploitation of twenty-firstcentury computer technology is advanced by others. Yet the disparate approaches are unified in their focus on encouraging learner engagement by professionally relevant activity. The law fraternity has perhaps been slow to pick up on the legal implications of an aspect of construction methods that has established a position of increasing importance over the past decade: building information modeling BIM. Ashcraft 2009 provides a clear explanation of the practical operation of what is, in conceptual terms, a beautifully simple solution to the problem of developing design. Instead of sheaf upon sheaf of subtly different iterations of project drawings, underpinned by document control systems of varying degrees of rigor and efficacy, BIM in theory, if not yet always in practice is a single, complete, coded model of the building under design. Depending on how it is interrogated, the model can provide any number of outputs architectural drawings, structural details, exploded component diagrams, but any changes made automatically affect the basic coded model and hence will effect commensurate changes on any outputs that are subsequently drawn off. This heralds, again in theory, the end of mismatches between architects’ and engineers’ drawings and sounds the death knell of different parties working from different versions of drawings and the discovery of component clashes as construction progresses. BIM appears to be a technology that could induce a paradigm shift Kuhn 1996 in the way that buildings are put together. However, Hurtado and O’Connor 2008 highlight legal problems that the implementation of BIM may give rise to. How is a building designed entirely on a BIM basis to be described in the contract documents? How is responsibility for the legal and financial impact of changes to the underlying model to be dealt with? Who has ownership of the model? Who can access the model? These are the types of problems that construction law educators may need to grapple with in the coming years. Though it may not be possible at this stage to say what the answers are, by considering the work of the contributors to this special issue, we can at least have a good idea of how to teach them, when they become available and without having to resort to any solutions as drastic as the one taken by Socrates himself!

Organizational Divisions in BIM-Enabled Commercial Construction

Proponents claim that the adoption of building information modeling BIM will lead to greater efficiencies through increased collaboration. In this paper, we present research that examines the use of BIM technologies for mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire life safety systems often referred to as MEP coordination and how the introduction of BIM influences collaboration and communication. Using data from over 12 months of ethnographic observations of the MEP coordination process for two commercial construction projects and interviews with 65 industry leaders across the United States, we find that BIM-enabled projects are often tightly coupled technologi- cally, but divided organizationally. This means that while BIM makes visible the connections among project members, it is not fostering closer collaboration across different companies. We outline the competing obligations to scope, project, and company as one cause for this division. Obligations to an individual scope of work or to a particular company can conflict with project goals. Individual leadership, especially that of the MEP coordinator in the teams we studied, often substitutes for stronger project cohesion and organization. Organi- zational forces and structures must be accounted for in order for BIM to be implemented successfully.

Teaching Building Information Modeling as an Integral Part of Freshman Year Civil Engineering Education

Lack of personnel with Building Information Modeling skills is a significant constraint retarding use of the technology in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. Unless is introduced into undergraduate civil engineering curricula in a fundamental way, graduate civil engineers will lack the skills needed to serve a construction industry in which three-dimensional models are the main medium for expression and communication of design intent and the basis for engineering analysis. A mandatory freshman year course titled Communicating Engineering Information, which teaches both theoretical and practical aspects of BIM, has been developed to replace the traditional engineering graphics course at the Technion. The main lesson learned through four semesters of teaching the class is that students find tools intuitive and therefore relatively easy to learn; the majority of lecture hours are now devoted to the conceptual aspects of and the principles for preparing models that can be analyzed in multiple ways. can and should be taught in its own right, and not as an extension to computer-aided drawing. The skills students have been able to bring to bear in design courses later in their university education indicate that the approach is sound and will enable graduates to meet the needs of the civil engineering profession in the BIM age. DOI: 10.1061/ASCEEI.1943-5541.0000003 CE Database subject headings: Engineering education; Information technology IT; Three-dimensional models. Author keywords: Engineering education; Building information modeling BIM; Three-dimensional models.

Selected and Revised Papers from the ASCE International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering 2007, Special Section 2

This issue of the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering presents the second of three special sections containing revised and extended versions of selected papers from the ASCE International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering 2007. Four technical papers are presented in this second special section. The first presents a method that addresses the unique requirements of building information modeling BIM in concrete construction, and the second outlines a way to integrate discrete event simulation and system dynamics to create a hybrid simulation tool with the benefits of both technologies. The third paper describes an approach for allowing cross-disciplinary searching in building information models, and the last presents new ways for addressing asset management issues of high-quantity, low-cost assets in transportation.