La validazione del contenuto informativo è la chiave del successo di un processo BIM-based

The construction industry, particularly the public sector, started drawing attention towards containing costs and increasing performance. This is why several public entities worldwide are promoting new strategies and adopted innovating approaches such as the Building Information Modelling (BIM). Countries like the UK, Germany, France and Spain are working on it through investments in the industry digitalization. In Italy, despite the fact that the growing implementation of information-based technologies is not supported by a governmental strategy, public calls for tender requiring BIM have been set up. In addition, in order to benefit from a BIM-based approach, cooperating processes are being arranged to involve several parties from the very first stages of the project itself. This way flaws will be sorted out in advance and out of the construction site, and at the same time ideal solutions will be identified for the entire building lifecycle. Within the BIM methodology, a key role is played by Model Checking, which enables verification and validation of all projects, not only in the design phase, but also throughout the process phases. In order to guarantee reliable results, an initial pre-check should be carried out, the so called BIM Validation. This validates the data content of the Information Model and subsequently carries out analyses such as Clash Detection and Code Checking. The Information Model must come out of a meticulous modelling phase, in order to validate its geometric and alphanumeric content and ensure reliable results first, and then proceed with subsequent BIM-based analyses

a performance based management system for cost prediction suitable for school building stock

The national existing school heritage is wide and varies significantly (e.g. morphology, age, construction, capacity, etc.) and many initiatives are ongoing to improve its safety, energy and functional situation. In a case study research the Municipality of Seregno has been adopted as sample municipality to analyze data collection and processing procedures with the aim to highlight the critical points and to develop and configure a management system able to bridge them. The research starts from the analysis of the energy performance of the school buildings pointing out the main needs and weaknesses. The following step is the tracking of the management procedures and data organization introduced to define a structure of the information able to support the new management system. Thus, a description and application of KPI helps to provide clear and data driven strategies for the improvement of the management system enabling a cost reduction. Finally, a proposed new energy management system, to be implemented within the Municipality procedures, defines a database, crucial to collect all the information about different properties and the energy audit procedures to gather and analyze the heating costs. The system is tested and discussed and furthermore allows to provide an energy predictive model for energy costs suitable for the Municipality to support a reliable resources plan

A BIM-based construction supply chain framework for monitoring progress and coordination of site activities

In spite of the growing implementation of Computer-aided technologies and Building Information Modeling (BIM) in AEC industry, building activities in construction sites are ineffectively monitored even now. Current formats of reporting and communicating the construction progress (e.g., textual progress reports, progress lines, and photographs) may not properly and quickly communicate the construction progress. In the proposed research the capability to communicate progress information right away and to share an Interactive Building Model (IBModel) are identified as the key components for successful management of the site and the supply chain network. This is carried out establishing the involved actors (Owner, Site Director, Site Safety Coordinator, Construction Companies and Suppliers) and setting them several options for the information management and visualization within the BIM environment. The monitoring system comes from the integration of the building and construction site model bestowing the visualization of site conditions on a set of graphical parametric rules, such as: chromatic visualization of building components referred to objects' completion percentage; thematic views, automatically extracted and updated, representing the real site conditions; and so forth. The monitoring system, supported by the BIM-based visualization model and managed in a Cloud computing seems to be one of the right directions for improving safety condition on one hand and site productivity and control on the other one

Integrated Design and Modelling-based Smart School Concept to Renovate the Existing School Building Sector

The schools lacking energy performance promotes deep buildings refurbishments, considering also LCC evaluation to define the cost-optimality criteria in building renovation. Moreover, available funding programs are not frequently appropriate to deal with energy law compliance because of the safety and accessibility issues are currently leading topics to be accomplished before. The governance indicates the school as the favoured centre of local community improvement and activities and the school building is advocated to encourage social interaction, clusters’ cooperation and space sharing, as a civic centre. These growing needs ask for new methodologies to approach the renovation of the school buildings considering on the one hand the energy demand and on the other hand the management of the spaces flexibility and of the whole asset during the entire life span. The method described here and applied to a case study is based on BIM to BEM procedures; it aims to demonstrate how to define a building database to store all the data able to endorse the management of maintenance strategies and energy developments, together with cost analysis for energy retrofitting

Re‐shaping the construction industry

Re-shaping the Construction Industry: an International Consensus seems to be convergent in order to trigger some impressive game changers. Namely, the Digitization appears as the most disruptive agent, together with the Circularity. It sounds a little bit paradoxical to imagine a radical innovation as far as a reluctant industry is concerned. A transformational narrative makes the transformation so easy to be achieved: nevertheless, such a storytelling encounters a fierce and silent opposition. This is the reason why the Digital Transition plays a crucial role, more relevant than the final destination, indeed. The XXI Century's early decades have been featured by Building Information Modelling (BIM) which arose and surged as the gate key entrance to the digital brave new world. It does mean that, once entered within the digital environment, any stakeholder needs to behave and act according to a computational way. It is clear that the stakeholders must be persuaded to enter the digital ecosystem by means of promising them to become more effective and finally to recover the lost productivity rates. To be viable, this expectaction has to be nurtured by arguing that the traditional players won't be menaced, in spite of the uberised ambiance of the disintermediation. Nonetheless, could they really avoid any fear or concern about the digitization's transformational power? Digitization has been correctly assessed as unavoidable, but the industry's analogical attitude remains quite deeply rooted. ISTeA, as a scientifical society, retains an institutional duty to foster the ultimate questions dealing with the digitization of the strategic supply chain. Apart from having been the societal chairman over the last six years, I have been involved into the international standardization works (at ISO and CEN level), the European institutional body (EU Task Group), some national initiatives (in Italy, France, Switzerland, and elsewhere), an academic joint research programme (between Italy and Germany), and I got a first hand understanding of the UK BIM Saga. The European digital journey is just starting, in spite of its origins dating back to the UK BIM Mandate issued in 2011 or to the US BIM Implementation: nevertheless, it is really astonishing to acknowledge how long it did progress since then. Likewise, the stated targets look as quite far to be reached, because of the intimate nature of the industry. I was learned to adopt a humble mood, my feeling became more and more cautious, because the items are quite sensitive and the stakes extremely valuable. The challenge lies between a couple of different poles: the whole digitization of the lowest tiered practictioners or trade contractors and the unforeseeable dimensions stemming and sourcing from Smart Cities and 4.0 Paradigms. How long the former intent will last? How deep the latter ambition will be? It is unthinkable to seek at answering such final questions: however, they undoubtedly conceal or disclose (?) the promise or menace of changing, re-inveinting, the usual identities. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are stimulating notions which entail new and unprecedented soft skills, although they recall a lot of expertises' replacement and erasement. A critical thought obviously avoids to accept any (re)evolutionary vision and prediction as forced and unescapable: meanwhile, the change drivers are so powerful and threathening. They cannot be neglected nor ignored. How our vision is differing from the actual on going outcomes? How our transformational efforts will be fanciful and whimsical, anything but a wishful thinking? ISTeA is currently accomplishing the six-year term I chaired: we were accepting an analogical legacy. At this time, our seminal scholars did retire and provided us with some interesting outcomes, which left forcefully unsolved the untrivial assumptions of the «industrial» era, to be faced again over our own term of office. I am not able to evaluate how successfully we performed: anyway, we tried to cope with the unknown phenomena searching at realizing any pros and cons. Eventually, the pioneering stages of the digital evolution are ending: our achievements might be judged as unstable. However, nowadays, ISTeA has the tremendous chance to freeze the ingrained issues pertaining to the Circular and Digital Economy and Society. Provided that, as the incumbent chairman, I might succeed in conveying to the successors the correct questions, as a trend-setter, the Scientifical Society's perspectives deal with problem-solving. Unfortunately, the strong temptation of explaining the radical and stochastic innovations in terms of incremental and mechanistic agents might seriously compromise any attempt, because a consulatory and selfish attitude can be adopted. My suggestions are focused upon the digital transition: it would be a hard task to renounce to a two-speeded route: the more the most advanced early adopters will progress, the more the laggards will suffer a gap. An intertwined approach, far away from chasms, has to be envisaged

TRACKING MEP INSTALLATION WORKS

Previous research has shown that “Scan-vs-BIM” systems are powerful to provide valuable information for tracking structural works (progress, quality, safety). However, the transferability of this capability to other construction areas such as MEP works has not been assessed so far. Comparatively, the construction of MEP systems, in particular pipes and ducts, tends to be more flexible with respect to the positioning of individual components, so that Scan-vs-BIM systems could be defeated when tracking MEP installation works. This paper presents recent results on the feasibility and performance of using a Scan-vs-BIM system to track MEP works. The approach followed is presented and then tested with two real-life challenging case studies were conducted simultaneously but totally independently in Canada and Italy. The results show that, as expected, pipes and ducts tend to be more loosely positioned than structural elements leading to a poorer performance of the Scan-vs-BIM system. Nonetheless, it appears that the system works well to assess the level of conformance of site installation works, providing valuable information for estimating emerging performance metrics like “percent built as-designed”. In addition, the proposed system could also be useful to accelerate and thus reduce the cost of delivering as-built BIM models for in the case of new builds

BIM e Digitalizzazione dell'Ambiente Costruito

Il volume tratta del Building Information Modelin