Loughborough University
Browse
- No file added yet -

Collaborative BIM in the cloud and the communication tools to support it

Download (406.21 kB)
conference contribution
posted on 2014-01-10, 09:17 authored by George Charalambous, Tony ThorpeTony Thorpe, Peter DemianPeter Demian, Steven Yeomans, Nathan Doughty, Chris Peters
Process in the AEC industry is characterised by the distributed and temporary nature of project teams; discipline specific teams engage in a highly collaborative process with not yet fully standardised requirements for information exchange which often results in chaotic communication patterns. This collaborative process makes communication and coordination challenging and intensifies the need for sophisticated software tools. Efforts to address some of the UK construction industry’s problems have seen rapid acceleration of BIM adoption in recent years. The exchange of interoperable building information models across teams provides the opportunity for an improved communication paradigm, where the “structured model” rather than the “document” acts as the focal unit of communication. Since collaborators are geographically distributed, this communication type finds its natural environment in online collaboration platforms hosting building information models. Effective collaboration requires coordinated communication and communicated coordination. BIM can be expressed as the “language of construction” and requires structure and standardization even on the human communication level. The life-cycle approach will pose additional collaboration requirements. Integrated, intuitive communication tools for BIM should replace e-mail. A preliminary analysis of data from the usage of online collaboration software, including network graph representations, provides some insight into usage patterns and serves as a basis for similar analyses as more of project data becomes available. Improved results would come from a better designed analysis of more projects.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Citation

CHARALAMBOUS, G. ... et al., 2013. Collaborative BIM in the cloud and the communication tools to support it. IN: Proceedings of the 30th CIB W78 International Conference on Applications of IT in the AEC industry, Beijing, China, 9-12 October 2013, pp. 58 - 67.

Publisher

Tsinghua University

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publication date

2013

Notes

This is a conference paper. It is also available to download from http://2013cibw78.civil.tsinghua.edu.cn/

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC