The design and construction community has shown increasing interest in adopting building information models (BIMs). The richness of information provided by BIMs has the potential to streamline the design and construction processes by enabling enhanced communication, coordination, automation and analysis. The resulting models that are created during the design and construction phases are now being provided to owners as part of the handover sequence of as-built facility information. BIM is becoming a delivery requirement for an increasing number of owner operator institutional organisations for its potential to address many of the challenges related to project delivery and handover, and to support operations and maintenance (O&M) of the facility throughout its lifecycle. However, there are many challenges in extracting specific information at different stages of a building’s lifecycle and numerous issues remain such that traditional design and construction models need to be significantly reworked.
Different methods used in IDEASS research to analyse organisation, requirements and model.
Dr. Sheryl Staub-French has been leading explorations of BIM-based project delivery processes and BIM-enabled data integration and model management. Leading studies of several BIM projects from different organisational perspectives (owners and subcontractors) and within different project networks (complex design-build networks and mechanical systems supply chain), she works closely with Dr. Pottinger to better understand the data integration issues across project phases (from design through construction with an emphasis on design and cost information) and across project scales (from the building scale to the campus/city scale).
4D construction simulation model for the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) building, by Hasan Burak Cavka and Ngoc Tran.
Student Involvement
- PhD student Hasan Cavka led the retrospective case study of CIRS that investigated the current building handover process and identified the potential implications for a BIM-based handover process, published in.
- MASc student Raza Ali explored the potential use of BIM for building operations and energy use, which is also based on a case study of the CIRS project.
- MASc student Helia Amiri led the investgiation of BIM-based tools to support cost estimating.
- PhD student Erik Poirier investigated the factors that impact BIM- based project delivery processes and identified metrics that could be used to assess the impact of BIM from an organizational and project network perspective, aspects of which were published in a conference paper.
- Working with Dr. Pottinger, post-Doc Madhav Nepal investigated how to extract construction information from a BIM, which was published in two journal papers.
