Construction Industry overview
The construction industry is a complex and dynamic sector which involves professionals from different backgrounds required to collaborate and design, construct and maintain a built asset. This revolves around production, managing and exchange of information among all the stakeholders in the project. As the project becomes more complex, this process results in chaos if it is not regulated and streamlined. This inefficiency further affects the overall budget, schedule and sometimes the end result, the building functionality. Over the years, the Construction industry has seen very little development in adopting digital technologies and efficient processes to convert an idea to reality. Building information modeling as an overall approach to the project is now becoming more popular allowing major developments in project delivery.
In traditional 2D CAD design, the different participants must wait for each other’s design completion; the data deliverables are piled in silos before they can be exchanged between the design teams. In such cases, data can become obsolete, in other words, the data goes to waste. In contrast, in BIM-based design, early and timely exchange of incomplete information between participants is enabled by sharing and integrating the building information models of the teams at any point in time. This allows real-time design adjustments and development. The information is then always up-to-date, and the clear design intent visualization facilitates communication between players and allows for continuous information flow instead of interrupted batch flow.
As the market is transitioning into a more digitized way of design and construction there was a lack of uniform project & asset information delivery plan throughout the life cycle of the built asset majority of the time causing duplication of data or data redundancy. In the traditional design construction and operation stage there is no connected database. Right from the initiation of the project till the handover of the asset there was a need for standard operating procedure to develop, manage and maintain the information.
The BIM framework in UK’s Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) spread across multiple standards, proposed a set of guidelines for construction projects -allowing owners, designers and construction teams a structured information production and exchange protocols. This greatly benefitted all stakeholders to communicate the requirements and deliver projects around the globe. Desapex project delivery framework was compliant with the PAS standards, creating a great foundation for the digitization plans it had.
Since these standards originated in the UK and there was an increase in demand by professionals across the world, there was a need for slight modifications to suit international standards and allow more collaboration between projects working in different countries. ISO 19650 is the internationally accepted framework for BIM implementation.