BIM-Based Platform for Collaborative Building Design and Project Management

The use of building information modeling (BIM) in large building systems in conjunction with team-effort collaborative design perhaps represents one of the most useful approaches in achieving cost-effectiveness as well as high-quality design results. Nevertheless, the major difficulty in using this technology lies in data exchanges when designers from different professions employ heterogeneous design tools. In this paper, a diagnosis of the major difficulties in data exchange among various design tools, particularly for collaborative design, is given. Subsequently, a BIM-based platform is proposed for collaborative design and project management to resolve data interoperability problems; thus, one can handle data exchange between different software tools in a streamlined fashion. The platform consists of a BIM-based database and five data-processing engines to facilitate the tasks involved in collaborative design. The platform is capable of handling BIM-based data from multiple design tools; yet it is generic enough to accept almost any design-related software tool. Finally, a multistory library building is used to illustrate various aspects of data processing involved in the stated collaborative design and project management.