Integrated system for BIM-based collaborative design
Introduction
As construction projects become larger and more complicated, the amount of information required dramatically increases. As a result, various problems such as difficulty in collaboration and information sharing among project participants have taken place. To solve these problems, a variety of BIM-based technologies and applications have been proposed [5], [22], [28], [36], [60].
BIM was introduced based on the concept of storing and managing various data produced throughout the building life cycle in an integrated manner [12]. The geometric and property information of building objects is modeled upon solving design errors that frequently occur during conventional paper-based design and difficulty in information exchange in the collaborative design process [27]. In BIM-based collaborative design, therefore, it is essential to exchange design information between various participants (e.g., architects, engineers, contractors, clients, etc.) for making decisions. So far, however, participants in BIM‐based design use different software according to work type and tasks in general, resulting in data loss in the process of information exchange, and this requires unnecessary duplication of work for data restoration [44]. Consequentially, unlike the ultimate purposes of BIM, due to limits in the application of BIM, the whole design process is still separated by phases and participants, which often causes additional cost and the inability to finish on schedule [12].
The design tools supporting BIM-based collaborative design should provide integrated functions that can be used throughout the design process. In addition, the information produced during collaborative design should be provided to participants in a timely manner. The integrated function and information in collaborative design make communication among design participants smooth and improve design quality and productivity by preventing unnecessary work. However, commercial BIM-based design tools used in practice are inadequate at providing a design environment from the perspective of integration, and most related studies have focused on information sharing using standard formats. Therefore, this study attempts to conceptualize integration for the improvement of BIM-based collaborative design and to propose an integrated design system. For this purpose, we derive problems based on analysis of conventional BIM-based collaborative design, and establish a concept from integration methodologies for the development of the BIM-based integrated design system.
Section snippets
Software and system integration
The lexical meaning of ‘software integration’ is “making disparate applications work together to produce a unified set of functionality” [24], and ‘system integration’ is defined as “the process of connecting systems, devices and programs together in a common architecture so as to share and exchange data” [58]. As such, system integration is a concept that includes software integration (Fig. 1). Therefore, the integrated system should be able to provide services to users in an integrated manner
Analysis of BIM-based collaborative design
BIM-based collaborative design is performed by using software that provides functions needed for the fulfillment of tasks in phases. To analyze the current status of BIM-based collaborative design, we derived functional requirements required for the four design phases defined by AIA (American Institute of Architects) [1]: Pre-design, Schematic Design, Design Development and Construction Documents. Table 3 summarizes the three requirements by phase: 1) BIM data generation and documentation, 2)
Development of integrated design system
As shown in Table 5, the proposed system is composed of the three major modules (i.e., BIM Modeler, BIM Checker, and BIM Server), and their functions are provided under the same Graphical User Interface (GUI). These modules were developed based on the ‘functional requirements for BIM-based collaborative design’ and the ‘three integration concepts’ as described in the previous sections.
Fig. 4 represents the collaborative design environment provided by the integrated design system. It shows how
Validation of integrated design system
For the validation of the integrated design system, we used the hospital building, that had been used to analyze the interoperability between Revit and Solibri in Section 3, and confirmed improvements compared to conventional task performance. Like the previous case, two architects and two MEP engineers modeled the building, and it took 8 h of work per day for 17 days. As a test case, we carried out a collaborative design between architecture and MEP, and compared the following eight performance
Conclusion
BIM was introduced to solve diverse problems produced during design and construction, but problems still exist in the BIM-based collaborative design due to differences in participants, work processes, and software applications. To solve these problems, this study established three integration concepts (‘functional integration,’ ‘integrated information management,’ and ‘integrated process support’) through the analysis of integration methodologies, and proposed an integrated design system.
The
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by grants (12 High-tech Urban D13, 13AUDP-C067836-01) from research programs funded by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, and a grant (No. 2014R1A2A1A11051772) funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of the Korean government (MSIP).
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