A Framework for Building Design Management in an Imperfect BIM Environment

Abstract

Building design process is a wide spectrum activity, regarding its complexity. It begins by simple compartments structures till large multistory administrative buildings, involving various specialties. Complex design management, where a multidisciplinary team or teams are involved in the design process; requires high level of collaboration to reach the optimized client goals economically and on time. BIM provides a wide range support for such an activity, where the most critical criterion in design management is ensuring the appropriate flow of information between design partners. Each participant in the design process should receive relevant data or information in a complete form and on time. And consequently design participant should send and share their design outputs with relevant personnel. The perfect BIM environment requires that all participants within the design process are using BIM supporting software, and vice versa. Markets where BIM application is still in the growing phase some of the design participants adopt BIM while others don’t. The main target of this paper is to propose a collaborative scheme to ensure information flow between design participants, using COBIE forms and XBIM toolkit; in the case where some of the participants in design process are not using BIM supporting software.