Developing Smart BIM Modules by Configuring Space Elements for Wall Finishing Jobs

Abstract

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has become a breakthrough technology in AEC industry It has been known to aid engineers in many aspects during construction project delivery Despite the emerging popularity of BIM technology there are still constraints and limitations upon fully utilizing BIM for construction project tasks This problem occurs due to the inability to realize existing conditions within actual construction project One of the commonly faced problems is the difficulties to precisely analyze finishing works from BIM model In order to overcome this issue a solution by developing smart BIM module is proposed The aim of this smart BIM module is to aid engineers upon analyzing construction finishing works without having to deal with tedious analysis and spend much time on it The smart BIM modules is expected to automatically recognize spatial configuration among building elements thus able to generate the correlated work items and quantity The smart BIM module is developed under the scope of wall finishing works in general residential building Therefore all the considerations taken are based on the designated scope On the other side BIM technology does support various integration to extend its workability further Autodesk Revit 2018 is used as the designated BIM software in this research This version of Autodesk Revit does support a built-in function of visual programming called Dynamo to extend BIM model processing The Dynamo itself also supports various capability up to the extent of accessing Revit’s Application Program Interface (API) to perform various functions unavailable by default All these features are utilized together to develop the smart BIM module The process to develop smart BIM module is initiated by developing a knowledge base of wall finishing works which will become the fundamental rules of smart building elements Later Dynamo is employed to assemble the overall workflow of smart BIM module Additional approach by accessing the Autodesk Revit API is also employed to overcome the constraints upon complying with the previously defined rules The smart BIM module covers the automatic analysis of BIM model where finishing works are applied and measured differently on different elements and spatial configurations The smart BIM module is then tested on residential building BIM project to check its reliability upon analyzing wall finishing works The final result was pretty satisfying since all the existing conditions could be recognized and the correlated work items could be identified and quantified properly By using this module the elements involved within wall finishing works could be made to behave smartly by retrieving only the regions involved according to the spatial configurations and measurement rules The result shows that all analysis results had successfully met with the previously determined rules on retrieving the correct and accurate work items This smart BIM module could aid engineers by saving the times required to get the accurate results of finishing works analysis

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chung-Wei Feng (Supervisor)