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  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?  Conventional workflows Digital workflows Information loss Project information Fig. 1.1 Loss of information caused by disruptions in the digital information flow.