Building Information Modeling In The Construction Industry

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

Construction industry has established and uses the basis of object-oriented building product modeling since 1990s. Initially, certain market sectors such as structural steel utilized the parametric 3D modeling in their design. Recently, various BIM tools became readily available when realizing the benefit of parametric 3D throughout the construction industry. This is a reward of construction industry’s dedication to Building Information Modeling for the last 20 years (Eastman, 2008). Construction industry has realize the true benefits of technological advancement in transforming of construction process to be more better.

1.2 What is BIM?

The conceptual underpinnings of the BIM system go back to the earliest days of computing. As early as 1962, Douglas C. Englebart gives us an uncanny vision of the future architect. Englebart suggests object based design, parametric manipulation and a relational database.

Seeing buildings through the lens of the database contributed to the breakdown of architecture into its constituent components, one of the first projects to successfully create a building database was the Building Description System (BDS) which was the first software to describe individual library elements which can be retrieved and added to a model. This program uses a graphical user interface, orthographic and perspective views and a sortable database that allows the user to retrieve information categorically by attributes including material type and supplier. The project was designed by Charles Eastman who was trained as an architect at Berkeley and went on to work in computer science at Carnegie Melon Uniersity. Eastman continues as expert in BIM technology and Professor at the G...

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...ion of BIM goes hand in hand with a new method that allows more partnering-like relationships between stakeholders. These collaborative relationships can create more cohesion between stakeholders, thus making it easier to work together towards a common goal of implementing BIM. The initial expenses associated with education and acquiring the hardware and software are necessary for transformation from traditional construction projects to BIM. Based on the result of questionnaire by Yan and Damian (2011), this category poses the largest challenges about 40% USA respondent and 20% UK respondent believe that their companies have to allocate lots of time, expenses and human resource in BIM training. The BIM experts pointed out that this is not a real challenge but should rather be viewed as an investment, which would pay off in the long run of construction company.

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