Distributed building information modeling in multidisciplinary collaboration

The development of computer-aided design (CAD) technology changed the working mode of professionals in the areas of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC). As a new generation of CAD technology implemented in the AEC area, building information modeling (BIM) can create a digital building model similar to its construction in the real world, and all the project participants can work with the same BIM model and share information about a project more accurately and in a timely fashion. Hence, BIM ideally can integrate all stakeholders from investors, the planners, contractors, and operators into an overall project plan. However, in the existing centralized BIM applications, the multidisciplinary collaboration is inefficient and causes inconvenience because the BIM applications from different vendors have their own encrypted format. Moreover, the professional applications such as structural analysis application and energy analysis application have different data schemas. The information exchange in the conventional BIM collaboration still relies on many inefficient operations, such as manual file conversion and data transfer, which are tedious and error-prone. Against this background, and in light of the fast development of information and communications technology (ICT), in this research, the author proposes a new concept called Distributed BIM (DBIM), which focuses on developing a seamless collaboration approach for BIM users. This study also elaborates on the DBIM definition by grouping and grading the DBIM into four levels. To help stakeholders to manipulate the BIM data flexibly and efficiently, this thesis examines the information ontology studies based on different disciplines. Ontologies in building energy assessment, structure analysis areas are studied in-depth. This study contributes in solving the problems of data exchange in multidisciplinary collaborations by extending data extraction services and communication modules on different software packages. We call this approach as “service-oriented architecture (SOA) based BIM collaboration”. Rather than using whole models, this approach uses partial models with smaller sizes to proceed efficient exchanges. In the implementation of this approach, this thesis demonstrates a prototype of the BIM collaboration framework based on a BIM application. The prototype is then implemented on the model exchanges in structural analysis and building energy assessment. In the case studies, the prototype is tested using three cases, which presents the processes of model data extraction, data communication, data validation, analysis, etc. This part follows an illustration of the advantages of dynamic and efficient data exchange. Finally, the thesis concludes by offering an outlook on future work.