The UK has nearly 30 million buildings, among which approximately 28 million (including 25 million homes) require refurbishment or retrofitting (RE2) by 2050 to meet national carbon targets – this will be the major work for the construction industry in the next 20 years. The main issue of RE2 is the unavailability or inaccurate building drawings, plans or blueprints. Without these, the RE2 project is open to a myriad of engineering unknowns and risks, causing additional concerns to health and safety, financial uncertainties and hazards. To optimise RE2, any project team must be able to work seamlessly with accurate building information (eg. plans, material, etc) on a digital and common platform called Building Information Modelling (BIM).
The use of BIM will be mandated for Government projects by 2016, valued at £46billion between 2016-2020 (HM Government, 2014). However, a BIM readiness report indicated that 73% of built environment (BE) small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have never worked with BIM models and SMEs represents 85% of the share of employment in the construction industry private sector. BIM models are not just 3D drawings; they offer much more. BIM allows accredited project team members to add, edit, delete and share real time information and design specification on a common technology. BIM can integrate and combine files from different design software (eg Autodesk Revit, Graphisoft ArchiCAD, Bentley Architecture) into a single file called IFC (Industry Foundation Classes). BIM provides multi-dimensional information of buildings or structures, identify design collision between the multidisciplinary project team; check for accessibility compliances; capture design and material information; supply chain integration and many more. Currently, there is no one-step automated scan-to-BIM hardware or software and the use of BIM for existing buildings is still very limited. Currently, to produce models for existing buildings, the interior and exterior can be scanned with a 3D scanner but this does not contain any information of the building, only point cloud data (PCD). Users can only guess the material and dimensions of the model. The PCD must be manually converted into in 3D models and manually associated with the information on material, dimensions, etc to create BIM models. This is often much too tedious and time consuming, causing high user errors and incorrect information. Is BIM for refurbishment possible ?
0 Comments
|