Building Information Modeling (BIM) for the Project Lifecycle

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The construction industry faces significant challenges to meet the demand for growth and renewal of the built environment, to meet increasingly aggressive sustainability targets, and to confront severe economic constraints. Building Information Modeling (BIM) coupled with more collaborative procurement modes is seen as having the greatest potential to transform industry practices to meet these demands. BIM involves a new approach to project delivery that focuses on developing, using and sharing a digital, information-rich model of a facility that forms the basis for decisions during the project life-cycle. A promise of BIM is that all disciplines in the supply chain can contribute to the model-based design of a facility, expanding the concept of performance-based design to the concurrent design of a project’s product, in this case the facility. Although current engineering methods and tools allow for discipline-specific analysis with BIM, there remain significant issues with integrating, coordinating, and understanding the many relationships between and among the various models of a facility. The proposed research on model-based multi-disciplinary coordination is focused on addressing these issues by enabling better coordinated, integrated and managed building information and related processes. Research over the next five years will focus on coordination issues that have broad applicability across multiple disciplines within design and construction, and that facilitate the use of BIM across the project life-cycle. Specifically, this research will focus on three aspects of the coordination problem: identifying and managing changes across the different discipline-specific models (e.g., changes between structural, mechanical, and construction models); representing and analyzing the compliance of BIMs at the building information handover between phases (e.g., the compliance of the mechanical model to meet the owner’s requirements for facility management); and interacting with BIM data as part of a collaborative decision-making process (e.g., navigating between different 2D and 3D representations). This research requires a multi-disciplinary and applied approach, which will be accomplished through continued collaborations with faculty researchers in computer science and architecture and with industry partners. The results of this research will help project teams make more informed decisions, and better manage their process to meet constraints of time, budget, and quality, and more flexibly adapt to changing circumstances. By providing better support for a model-based and collaborative project delivery process, we will have a significant impact on the resulting end product, including higher quality, more sustainable buildings that perform better at reduced cost.