Requirements for BIM-based building design coordination processes

Building design coordination is a critical and challenging task to ensure that the design meets the functional, aesthetic, and economic requirements of project stakeholders. The cost of design coordination can be significant, with some estimating as high as two percent of the total cost on projects. It is therefore imperative that coordination issues get resolved as efficiently as possible, particularly given that thousands of conflicts may be identified during design coordination. Even with implementation of Building Information Modelling (BIM) project participants still face significant challenges that disrupt and hinder the coordination process. I have identified three critical issues that impact the successful implementation of BIM in design coordination processes: (1) the extent of BIM-based design coordination processes and protocols implemented, (2) the efficiency and ease in which practitioners interact with state of the art of BIM tools, and (3) the effectiveness in which design coordination issues are captured, represented and documented. Very little research has specifically looked at the BIM-based building design coordination with such focus. This dissertation investigates BIM-based building design coordination through the lens of two state of the art public sector projects. The research involved embedded case study analyses and a mixed-method contextualist research approach that included iterative grounded theory and co-production of knowledge. The investigation of BIM-based design coordination resulted in the formalization of design coordination processes, identification of bottlenecks faced by practitioners, and development of design considerations for BIM tools. The exploration of design coordination meetings resulted in taxonomy of interactions with design artifacts, outlining the relationships between goals, artifacts, interactions and transitions. The research on design coordination issue representation resulted in a classification taxonomy that explicitly represents process-based, model-based, and physical design issues. This research has many practical implications to the construction industry, as well as the BIM software development community. The research enables practitioners and researchers to better understand the challenges of BIM-based design coordination processes, helps the software development community to design state of the art BIM tools to better support practitioner interactions and navigations with BIM, and better manage and represent design coordination issues encountered throughout the coordination process.Applied Science, Faculty ofCivil Engineering, Department ofGraduat

BIM-based building design coordination: processes, bottlenecks, and considerations

Successful management of the building design coordination process is critical to the efficient delivery of cost-effective and quality projects. The traditional setting of design coordination, however, is inefficient and error-prone. Building information modelling (BIM) has proven valuable for increasing satisfaction with the meeting process and decreasing arguments over issues. Despite the many advantages of BIM tools, however, many design coordination issues remain undetected, design issues are poorly documented, and coordination strategies are inefficient. The objective of this study was to develop a characterization of the BIM building design coordination process, identify the bottlenecks in the current process, and provide design considerations to alleviate the bottlenecks. The bottlenecks include: outdated BIM, disconnected trades, lack of terminology, insufficient documentation, inefficient transitions across views and artifacts, unavailability of design information, information discrepancy, unfit navigation tools, and office–site disconnect. The outcomes of this research is useful for future construction projects and the software development community.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author