Building Information Modeling

Building Information Modeling is based on the idea of the continuous use of digital building models throughout the entire lifecycle of a built facility, starting from the early conceptual design and detailed design phases, to the construction phase, and the long phase of operation. BIM significantly improves information flow between stakeholders involved at all stages, resulting in an increase in efficiency by reducing the laborious and error-prone manual re-entering of information that dominates conventional paper-based workflows. Thanks to its many advantages, BIM is already practiced in many construction projects throughout the entire world. However, the fragmented nature of the construction industry still impedes its more widespread use. Government initiatives around the world play an important role in increasing BIM adoption: as the largest client of the construction industry in many countries, the state has the power to significantly change its work practices. This chapter discusses the motivation for applying BIM, offers a detailed definition of BIM along with an overview of typical use cases, describes the common BIM maturity grades and reports on BIM adoption levels in various countries around the globe. A. Borrmann ( ) Chair of Computational Modeling and Simulation, Technical University of Munich, München, Germany e-mail: andre.borrmann@tum.de M. König Chair of Computing in Engineering, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: koenig@inf.bi.rub.de C. Koch Chair of Intelligent Technical Design, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Weimar, Germany e-mail: c.koch@uni-weimar.de J. Beetz Chair of Design Computation, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany e-mail: j.beetz@caad.arch.rwth-aachen.de © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 A. Borrmann et al. (eds.), Building Information Modeling, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92862-3_1 1 2 A. Borrmann et al. 1.1 Building Information Modeling: Why? In the last decade, digitalization has transformed a wide range of industrial sectors, resulting in a tremendous increase in productivity, product quality and product variety. In the Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) industry, digital tools are increasingly adopted for designing, constructing and operating buildings and infrastructure assets. However, the continuous use of digital information along the entire process chain falls significantly behind other industry domains. All too often, valuable information is lost because information is still predominantly handed over in the form of drawings, either as physical printed plots on paper or in a digital but limited format. Such disruptions in the information flow occur across the entire lifecycle of a built facility: in its design, construction and operation phases as well as in the very important handovers between these phases. The planning and realization of built facilities is a complex undertaking involving a wide range of stakeholders from different fields of expertise. For a successful construction project, a continuous reconciliation and intense exchange of information among these stakeholders is necessary. Currently, this typically involves the handover of technical drawings of the construction project in graphical manner in the form of horizontal and vertical sections, views and detail drawings. The software used to create these drawings imitate the centuries-old way of working using a drawing board. However, line drawings cannot be comprehensively understood by computers. The information they contain can only be partially interpreted and processed by computational methods. Basing the information flow on drawings alone therefore fails to harness the great potential of information technology for supporting project management and building operation. A key problem is that the consistency of the diverse technical drawings can only be checked manually. This is a potentially massive source of errors, particularly if we take into account that the drawings are typically created by experts from different design disciplines and across multiple companies. Design changes are particularly challenging: if they are not continuously tracked and relayed to all related plans, inconsistencies can easily arise and often remain undiscovered until the actual construction – where they then incur significant extra costs for ad-hoc solutions on site. In conventional practice, design changes are marked only by means of revision clouds in the drawings, which can be hard to detect and ambiguous. The limited information depth of technical drawings also has a significant drawback in that information on the building design cannot be directly used by downstream applications for any kind of analysis, calculation and simulation, but must be re-entered manually which again requires unnecessary additional work and is a further source of errors. The same holds true for the information handover to the building owner after the construction is finished. He must invest considerable effort into extracting the required information for operating the building from the drawings and documents and enter it into a facility management system. At each of 1 Building Information Modeling: Why? What? How? 3 Conceptual Design Construction Detailed Design Operation Time Conventional workflows Digital workflows Information loss Project information Fig. 1.1 Loss of information caused by disruptions in the digital information flow. (Based on Eastman et al. 2008) these information exchange points, data that was once available in digital form is lost and has to be laboriously re-created (Fig. 1.1). This is where Building Information Modeling comes into play. By applying the BIM method, a much more profound use of computer technology in the design, engineering, construction and operation of built facilities is realized. Instead of recording information in drawings, BIM stores, maintains and exchanges information using comprehensive digital representations: the building information models. This approach dramatically improves the coordination of the design activities, the integration of simulations, the setup and control of the construction process, as well as the handover of building information to the operator. By reducing the manual re-entering of data to a minimum and enabling the consequent re-use of digital information, laborious and error-prone work is avoided, which in turn results in an increase in productivity and quality in construction projects. Other industry sectors, such as the automotive industry, have already undergone the transition to digitized, model-based product development and manufacturing which allowed them to achieve significant efficiency gains (Kagermann 2015). The Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, however, has its own particularly challenging boundary conditions: first and foremost, the process and value creation chain is not controlled by one company, but is dispersed across a large number of enterprises including architectural offices, engineering consultancies, and construction firms. These typically cooperate only for the duration of an individual construction project and not for a longer period of time. Consequently, there are a large number of interfaces in the ad-hoc network of companies where digital information has to be handed over. As these information flows must be supervised and controlled by a central instance, the onus is on the building owner to specify and enforce the use of Building Information Modeling. 4 A. Borrmann et al. 1.2 Building Information Modeling: What? A Building Information Model is a comprehensive digital representation of a built facility with great information depth. It typically includes the three-dimensional geometry of the building components at a defined level of detail. In addition, it also comprises non-physical objects, such as spaces and zones, a hierarchical project structure, or schedules. Objects are typically associated with a well-defined set of semantic information, such as the component type, materials, technical properties, or costs, as well as the relationships between the components and other physical or logical entities (Fig. 1.2). The term Building Information Modeling (BIM) consequently describes both the process of creating such digital building models as well as the process of maintaining, using and exchanging them throughout the entire lifetime of the built facility (Fig. 1.3). The US National Building Information Modeling Standard defines BIM as follows (NIBS 2012): Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility. A BIM is a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during its life-cycle; defined as existing from earliest conception to demolition. A basic premise of BIM is collaboration by different stakeholders at different phases of the life cycle of a facility to insert, extract, update or modify information in the BIM to support and reflect the roles of that stakeholder. Fig. 1.2 A BIM model comprises both the 3D geometry of each building element as well as a rich set of semantic information provided by attributes and relationships 1 Building Information Modeling: Why? What? How? 5 Construction Detailed Design Operation Conceptual Design Modification Demolition Facility Management, Maintenance, Repair Cost estimation Design Options Progress Monitoring Simulations and Analyses Logistics Process Simulation Coordination Visualization Spatial Program