Looking at Infrastructure and BIM
BIM adoption has been slower among infrastructure and civil engineering professionals. Here’s a list of potential reasons:
✔ No real incentive to share information: The traditional “You do your bit, I’ll do mine” is still very common in civil and infrastructure work. Specialist subject areas are technically very complex.
✔ Perception that BIM may delay making site progress: Whereas it is obviously cost effective to design out a clash between pipework and an architectural element in a building project before getting on-site, on a highways project engineers see getting around these issues as standard activity. This is especially true when projects are urgent or working to very tight timescales. Infrastructure clients sometimes see designing out all the clashes ahead of time as inefficient when in fact it could save millions of dollars in the bigger picture.
✔ Lack of software designed to coordinate information at the scale of civil engineering projects: Tools and platforms exist with infrastructure in mind, but they’re generally targeted at one profession or discipline and for specific project sizes.
✔ Information standards are rare and not enforced in the majority of projects: A stalemate results, where teams just continue with existing processes and no overall management of the entire built asset exists. In simple terms, you need to ensure that the trains will fit in the stations.
Developing Building Processes and BIM
BIM isn’t just technology and it’s definitely not just software. BIM is a best-practice process and therefore can impact project management and procurement just like some methodology, such as PRINCE2 or Agile, may completely restructure the delivery of a computing project.
BIM has the potential to make the design process easier and more efficient. Basic benefits of digital modeling include the ability to check if one designer’s work clashes with another, being able to try lots of iterative designs out and fully understanding their impact, and better energy modeling and analysis.
✔ Clash detection: Projects that use BIM need the whole project team to work together, and each discipline will be developing a model in isolation. This can lead to coordination issues like overlapping systems or designs that can’t be built because of other components getting in the way. When the models are brought together, it’s important that problems are resolved and communicated through clash detection tools.
✔ Multiple design options: BIM lets you build digitally before you ever have to try things on-site. This opens up lots of possibilities, so you can test your ideas and work through many structural, engineering, and design concepts. The benefit of BIM is being able to interrogate these concepts in terms of their cost or complexity by using intelligent BIM objects. Then the entire project team can review the design at regular stages.
✔ Energy analysis: The construction industry is gradually becoming more sustainable, aiming to reduce energy use and waste on projects. BIM during design phases allows you to understand the impact of design decisions on energy use, overheating, and air circulation through energy analysis tools.
BIM has many benefits during the construction phase of built projects. BIM can be used to schedule and plan out the construction process, including the movement of vehicles and plant machinery. The design decisions made in the model and increased precision of measurement should result in less wastage and higher accuracy during installation, along with the ability to explain difficult construction details.
Using the model as a communication method improves project teams’ ability to collaborate and coordinate the work being done on-site. The model can also be used to calculate and manage the cost and time constraints of the project. In the long term, BIM will move toward automating the process of code approvals and building regulations too.
BIM can reduce costs during the operation phase of buildings, because the model forms an as-built record of all the systems constructed and installed. If the model is kept up to date, then BIM becomes an ongoing process to track maintenance, issues, and changes through the life of an asset. You can alert operational teams when systems are about to fail, pass their warranty date, or when they require maintenance or replacement according to a pre-written schedule.
As built assets become more automated and require more advanced building management systems, the BIM process will become fully integrated with these systems. You’ll be able to optimize heating, ventilation, and lighting systems based on the real-time use of spaces.
BIM can dramatically change many industries, and it needs a combination of people, processes, and platforms with data at the centre. Instead of the traditional industry resulting in one built asset, BIM will provide two, a physical and a digital one. Make sure that both are well designed and constructed securely using best practices, and that they’re easy to understand and maintain during their use.
Chapter 3
Examining the Information Part of BIM
In This Chapter
▶ Focusing on the “I” in BIM
▶ Establishing who’s going to add and edit information, extract and use model outputs, and keep everything updated
▶ Interrogating the data in the Building Information Model
▶ Collaborating with information
The projects you work on are packed full of data, from costs and quantities to certificates and standards. Every component of a built environment project, whether it’s a building, bridge, tunnel, or airport, is accompanied by a wealth of associated performance measurements, values, and facts. Somehow you need to manage and maintain this information as the project evolves. Information management is a huge task and traditional methods can be very inefficient.
Chapter 1 includes our definition of Building Information Modeling (BIM), simplifying many of the alternative (complicated) explanations you may have heard into a clear, concise sentence you can easily remember. The most important thing to realize is that BIM isn’t just a technology, and it isn’t just about engineering geometry or fancy visualizations. You need to be able to understand the project beyond how the components fit together and how it will look when built. In this chapter, we take a tour of the information aspect of BIM and show why it’s literally at the heart