Bill of Quantities with 3D Views Using Building Information Modeling

Automated quantity take-off in a Norwegian road project

Automated quantity take-off from digital models in road projects has many benefits. In real project settings, however, it seems rarely to take place. This paper investigates automated quantity take-off in a real-life road project and the experiences from this automation. A literature and a document study were performed. 48 domain models serialized in IFC 2 × 3 were then analyzed before 10 project members were interviewed. The quantity take-off was automated to harvest classified quantities to a specification of work. The automated quantity take-off was reproducible at revisions for 40% of the cost items. However, the transferability of the procedures to other use cases than the specification of work is questionable because of the applied cost breakdown structure. The findings suggest three practical improvements for automated quantity take-off in road projects. The three include (1) using unambiguous classes assembled in an ontology, (2) avoiding hard coding of cost breakdown structures in authoring tools, and (3) implementing the Level of Information Need (LOIN) to improve reusability across project phases and use cases. The quantity take-off and experiences are assessed from the designer's perspective. The client's and contractor's perspectives were out of this paper's scope.

Digital Twins for Managing Railway Bridge Maintenance, Resilience, and Climate Change Adaptation

Innovative digital twins (DTs) that allow engineers to visualise, share information, and monitor the condition during operation is necessary to optimise railway construction and maintenance. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an approach for creating and managing an inventive 3D model simulating digital information that is useful to project management, monitoring and operation of a specific asset during the whole life cycle assessment (LCA). BIM application can help to provide an efficient cost management and time schedule and reduce the project delivery time throughout the whole life cycle of the project. In this study, an innovative DT has been developed using BIM integration through a life cycle analysis. Minnamurra Railway Bridge (MRB), Australia, has been chosen as a real-world use case to demonstrate the extended application of BIM (i.e., the DT) to enhance the operation, maintenance and asset management to improve the sustainability and resilience of the railway bridge. Moreover, the DT has been exploited to determine GHG emissions and cost consumption through the integration of BIM. This study demonstrates the feasibility of DT technology for railway maintenance and resilience optimisation. It also generates a virtual collaboration for co-simulations and co-creation of values across stakeholders participating in construction, operation and maintenance, and enhancing a reduction in costs and GHG emission.

Building Information Modelling Feasibility Study for Building Surveying

Despite the advancements in digital technologies, the current building design examination practice is 2D and paper-based, and a large number of 2D plans and drawings need to be collated and interpreted to examine if the proposed designs comply with building regulations. Subsequently, it is prone to human errors that make sustainable and consistent design difficult. Although Building Information Modelling (BIM) is recognised as a means to transform the current practice into a more sustainable and productive practice, BIM has rarely been adopted in building design examination. This research aims to identify the reasons for the low uptake of BIM and to examine the feasibility of BIM for building design examination through a focus group interview and workshop. A lack of proper BIM training is identified as the most critical barrier to adopting BIM. Building design examiners indicate that BIM adoption requires consistent efforts with empirical errors, since the existing work processes are not flexible enough to embrace BIM instantly without proper BIM training. An average of three days can be saved by using BIM for a building regulations check. This research revealed that BIM is feasible for building regulation checking, and the low uptake is mainly caused by a lack of awareness of the BIM capabilities.