Development of a BIM library for NbS design

Abstract

The BIM methodology has become a key tool in the civil engineering and construction industry. Through its application to urban development, it can contribute to the design of more resilient cities by incorporating sustainability indicators related to climate data and natural disasters, as well as by creating adaptive designs and generating scenario simulations. Due to the fact that BIM methodology is centered on a 3D model, one of the first steps is to undertake its creation. Despite the fact that there are numerous authoring software for this task, the time required may be high when developing projects related to sustainability-oriented urban development, which can include very specific elements such as Nature-based Solutions (NbS). In order to speed up this process, this paper pre-sents a proposal for a semi-automated library of NbS. This proposal uses a com-bination of a calculation tool for the automatic dimensioning of the techniques for a specific intervention point, along with a design authoring software to auto-matically generate BIM objects together with the associated information of the corresponding technique. This work streamlines the process of generating BIM models in urban design.This study is partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program through the D4RUNOFF project and under grant agreement Num-ber 101060638. Valerio Andrés-Valeri also like to thank the Spanish Ministry of Uni-versities and the University of Cantabria for partially fund his research activities with EU Next Generation funds through the Maria Zambrano postdoctoral fellowship program