BIM conference report

By Alan Farrell and Christophe Krief MCIAT, Republic of Ireland Centre.

The Construction IT Alliance held a conference in Dublin on 10  February 2016. The event was focused on ‘Building Digital Momentum for Architectural, Engineering and Construction Industries’.  CIAT was among famous 'brands' at the conference, with Graphisoft, Autodesk, Bentley, IBM for the IT sector, and RIAI, SCSI, CIOB representing the construction sector along with the CIAT.  The conference was chaired by the president of the RIAI, Carole Pollard.  

PAUL DOHERTY, Chairman of the BIM Company, elaborated on Dubai, which recently won the bid to host the World Expo 2020, with the theme of 'Connecting Minds, Creating the Future'. The Expo is expected to result in the employment of 277,000 persons in the UAE, an investment of up to €35 billion into the economy and the arrival of over 25 million visitors. Dubai has already announced mega smart city projects across a number of industries, with the ultimate goal of being connected, providing optimum resource management and an immense opportunity for providers of smart solutions.   

JOERN PLOENNIGS, Research Scientist at IBM, explained how building owners commissioning a building into production, need the BIM model to perform facilities management. Both Paul Doherty and Joern Ploennigs described smart connected cities and buildings designed around BIM with driverless cars, GPS, sensors and other technologies connected through Building Information Models. The future resides in smart buildings, adapting to visitors and users by developing artificial intelligence.   

BRENDAN KEANE from the Construction Client Forum, explained that the transition from the traditional construction procedure to the BIM evolution will take time for everyone to convert. Changing the procedure means that experienced and qualified personal must start again as novices within a new system. Brendan's position was viewed as too sceptical for some of the audience, as he was criticised for his lack of promotional argument for the BIM project.

LUIS BLANES, Architect, Msc. in Energy Building and Environmental Performance Modelling, is currently a PhD researcher at NUIG Galway. His presentation was focused on the need for new programs and methods of producing reliable energy simulations, supporting Building Information Modelling technology. Current methods and programs for running energy simulations require manual data input from design documents and energy simulation tools, potentially leading to biased decision- making by the energy modeller and time-consuming approaches. Expert interventions are required due to a lack of compatibility between BIM and energy simulation software.

However, an opportunity exists to automate, where possible, the creation of model inputs based on existing semantic data contained in BIM. Luis is also involved with the research group IRUSE (Information Research Unit For Sustainable Engineering) committed to realising the objective of BEM (Building Energy Modelling) using a combination of effective modelling technology developments and implementations, calibration methodologies, fault detections and diagnosis tools.

Luis mentioned the Zutec Cloud Platform, a mobile solution that allows the user to capture any type of data, reducing potential errors and improving productivity. He also discussed the Built2Spec platform which will be integrated into the operations of small and medium-sized contractors, large construction firms, and end user/clients directly within the consortium and work program activities, assuring systematic and scientific performance measures, feedback, powerful exploitation and dissemination strategies.  

This is happening now. Attending the conference one could see that the traditional AEC industry entered the first phase of a monumental change with the use of Building Information Modelling as a tool for quality and project delivery. It is not only the design process that BIM is changing, but the complete industry, the city, its buildings and infrastructure.    

BIM is still in the early stages of development with unresolved technical issues, lack of training, costs implications, and so on. The key to a successful adoption and implementation of BIM involves new methods and new ways of approaching the construction project.