Building Information Modelling (BIM)—versioning for collaborative design

The engineering design process is a complicated activity. It is often characterized by multi-disciplinary teams in multiple places working together on a single project, using different models and software tools. In addition, such activities generate a large amount of data that require exchange among designers and stages of the work. In industry, the current collaboration approaches often focus on integrating and managing multiple models from multi-designers. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is playing a major role in facilitating collaboration. BIM provides an opportunity to electronically model and manage the vast amount of information embedded in a building project, from conception to completion. In the building design process, changes and modifications are inevitable even in the contemporary BIM approach. Such changes need to be well managed to keep track of changes to ensure that designers have an up-to-date version of the BIM model. The main goal of this research is to develop a collaborative BIM platform that tackles the challenges of integrating object versioning, as a change management approach, and an IFC model, as data representation of BIM. This has been done through suggesting new IFC extensions to add further concepts representing the history of changing to any object of the model. It also explores possibilities of adding or merging object-based change information to existing BIM models to enable the representation of design intentions, identification of affected changes numerically and visually. A prototype system is implemented in C#, using .NET framework and Revit API platform. This paper concludes that the proposed system can contribute to improving collaboration - in terms of tracking and management of affected changes during multi-disciplinary design process

Deriving Functional Requirements for BIM-based Design e-Collaboration

학위논문 (석사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 건축학과 건축공학전공, 2015. 8. 박문서.The design phase in a construction project is a complex process due to various disciplines, which continuously collaborate for design, e.g., architecture, landscape architecture, structural, mechanical, and lighting/electrical engineering. During the collaboration process, there are number of obstacles which can cause low productivity and quality of design. These obstacles could be summarized as follows: (1) Time and space constraints which are caused due to the dispersion of the participants (2) Difficulty in communication between the various participants (3) Efficient management of information produced in the design collaboration. To solve these problems, BIM-based Collaboration System (BCS) has been developed. However, although there are various BCS in practice, the expectation on productivity improvement using the e-collaboration has not been met. This is because most of the BCSs are composed by too many functions for design project. It could cause decreasing productivity of design collaboration because of distribution of information, time and cost for training, increased probability of error, and low usability. Therefore definite primary functional requirement should be derived to prevent decreasing productivity. For this, this paper derives primary functional requirement for BIM-based design e-collaboration, using analysis of existing BIM-based collaboration systems, Delphi survey, and Focus Group Interview (FGI). Then the assessment of derived 33 functional requirement in 4 categories is performed for validation of this research. The results of this research may be used for developing BIM-based collaboration system reflected user requirement fully which enable information and data exchange, and to manage building model, drawing, and other submittals effectively. The authors regard that it would be improving the productivity of design e-collaboration and the quality of design in design phase.Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Research Background & Problem Statement 1.2 Research Objective & Scope 1.3 Research Process & Methodology Chapter 2 PELIMINARY STUDY 2.1 Design Collaboration & BIM 2.2 BIM-based Collaboration System 2.3 User Requirement Analysis Method 2.4 Summary Chapter 3 DERIVING FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENT FOR BIM-BASED E-COLLABORATION 3.1 Function Analysis for Function Pool 3.1.1 Function Analysis of BIM-based Collaboration System 3.1.2 Derived Function Pool 3.2 Filtering Functions by Essentiality 3.2.1 Survey 3.2.2 Analysis of Survey Result 3.3 Function Selection 3.3.1 Focus Group Interview 3.3.2 Derived Functional Requirement 3.4 Summary Chapter 4 VALIDATION OF DERIVED FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS 4.1 Application with Derived Functional Requirements 4.2 Survey for Assessment 4.3 Results & Analysis of Assessment 4.4 Summary Chapter 5 CONCLUSION 5.1 Research Results 5.2 Contributions 5.3 Limitation and Further Study Reference Appendices Abstract (Korean)Maste