Abstract:
Project success is intimately coupled with collaborative interaction among the stakeholders and integration of information from everyone throughout the project life cycle. Building information modeling (BIM) helps translate the owner's value preposition into a successful project by enabling continuous information flow and delivering a high value product. On traditional 2D CAD projects, the information flow between the players and project stages is jumbled. However, on BIM based projects, the interaction is more flexible and overlapped where information is aggregated and shared transparently between the different users (owners, architects, structural and MEP engineers, consultants, contractors, and subcontractors). The purpose of this paper is to understand how BIM can improve project information flow. This is accomplished by modeling interactions among participants across the conceptual and schematic design stages as opposed to the traditional process of having information silos with sub-optimal communication between various project players. In this respect, two process models are created for traditional and BIM information flow. After that, a comparison between the two models is carried out to assess the potential design process improvements resulting from the use of BIM. The research contributes towards highlighting where failure in communication occurs and the hurdles preventing stream-lined workflow.