# A BIM Platform for the Manufacture of Prefabricated Steel Structure
## 1 Introduction  
In China, prefabricated steel structures have been widely built due to their environmental friendliness, sustainability, and low labor cost. A prefabricated building consists of factory-made components or units that are transported and assembled on-site. Prefabricated construction is the practice of assembling a variety of components of a structure at a manufacturing site and transporting the sub-assemblies to the construction site. Previous studies have concluded that the effectiveness of prefabricated building policies (PBPs) significantly affects the promotion and performance of prefabricated buildings [1]. In 2016, the General Office of the State Council, PRC issued the \"Guiding opinions on vigorously developing prefabricated buildings,\" striving to make it account for 30% of the new building area within ten years and also encouraging design companies and research institutes to develop design technology and universal software for prefabricated buildings. In 2019, the General Office of the State Council issued a policy which strives to promote the integrated application of BIM (building information modeling), big data, mobile Internet, cloud computing, IoT (Internet of Things), artificial intelligence, and other technologies in the whole process of design, construction, operation, and maintenance, to promote the delivery and application of digital achievements in engineering construction, and improve the information level of the construction industry. Furthermore, the \"Outline of the National Informatization DevelopmentStrategy\" proposed the \"Internet+\" action, is required to improve the informatization level of the construction industry. In conclusion, the deep integration of the industry will give full play to the leading and supporting role of informatization in the construction industry and reshape its new industrial state. In this article, a BIM platform for the manufacture of a prefabricated steel structure is developed by cooperating with a manufacturing company of steel structures. The company is located in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China. Covering 346 acres, it specializes in the manufacture of prefabricated steel structures such as multi-layer steel frame structure, large-span spatial structures, bridge steel structures, and modular buildings. Moreover, this company focuses on civil construction, public construction, industrial construction, municipal engineering, overseas engineering, and other fields. Many problems arise during the manufacturing process due to the unreasonable information flow, such as chaotic management, opaque component production process, and disability statistics of the manufacturing data. The quality issues of each production batch may not be sent to the foremen in time. Furthermore, the quantity of manufacturing components in each workshop is usually invisible. As a negative aspect, critical information of projects is often invisible, resulting in different stakeholders not grasping the manufacturing progress immediately. The well-formatted information of manufacturing components at the right time in the right process is still insufficient to raise the efficiency of collaborative working and decision making in manufacturing services further when adopting BIM in the prefabricated construction projects. The aim of this study is to develop a BIM platform, which serves as a collaborative tool for steel structure factories, to visualize the manufacturing progress, track the manufacturing status of steel components, and reduce excessive information exchange. The BIM platform is developed by employing BIM as the necessary infrastructure to handle these challenges. Among the manufacture of prefabricated steel structures, BIM serves as the necessary concept for tracking the manufacturing process of components. It also serves a variety of working groups and decision-makers as a collaborative tool.