Construction Innovation: Information, Process, Management

Emerald Article: Emerging technologies for BIM 2.0 Jason Underwood, Umit Isikdag

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To cite this document: Jason Underwood, Umit Isikdag, (2011),"Emerging technologies for BIM 2.0", Construction Innovation: Information, Process, Management, Vol. 11 Iss: 3 pp. 252 - 258 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14714171111148990 Downloaded on: 01-08-2012 References: This document contains references to 15 other documents To copy this document: permissions@emeraldinsight.com This document has been downloaded 846 times since 2011. *

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Andy K.D. Wong, Francis K.W. Wong, Abid Nadeem, (2011),"Government roles in implementing building information modelling systems: Comparison between Hong Kong and the United States", Construction Innovation: Information, Process, Management, Vol. 11 Iss: 1 pp. 61 - 76 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14714171111104637 Rizal Sebastian, (2011),"Changing roles of the clients, architects and contractors through BIM", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 18 Iss: 2 pp. 176 - 187 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09699981111111148 Don Mah, Juan D. Manrique, Haitao Yu, Mohamed Al-Hussein, Reza Nasseri, (2011),"House construction CO<DN>2</DN> footprint quantification: a BIM approach", Construction Innovation: Information, Process, Management, Vol. 11 Iss: 2 pp. 161 - 178 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14714171111124149

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EDITORIAL

Emerging technologies for BIM 2.0

Jason Underwood
University of Salford, Salford, UK, and

252

Umit Isikdag
Beykent University, Istanbul, Turkey
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to present a new perspective regarding how newly emerging ICT may have an impact on Building Information Modelling and Management (BIM-M); specically, towards enabling the next generation of (full state) BIMs. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents a literature and technology review, and articulates a novel vision for the future of BIM. It starts with exploring how ICT has had an impact on shaping and modernising the sector, compared to the traditional, archaic and draconian heritage. The paper elaborates on the current interpretation of BIM-M and emerging technologies that may change this interpretation from a semantic model to a full state digital building model evolving through the lifecycle of a building. Findings The vision presented in this paper underlines the focus that BIM-M is now becoming broader, as the information management paradigm shifts from enabling model-based management of shared building information, which provides meaningful data about a building in a standardised way (i.e. BIM 1.0), to enable an integrated environment of distributed information which is always up to date and open for derivation of new information (i.e. BIM 2.0). Technologies such as cloud computing, sensor networks, stateless web services and semantic web are presented as the new facilitators of this paradigm shift. Originality/value This paper provides value by stipulating a new vision (i.e. BIM 2.0) for BIM-M and BIM (in particular) in light of emerging technologies such as cloud computing, sensor networks and semantic webs. Keywords Buildings, Information technology, Modelling Paper type Research paper

Construction Innovation Vol. 11 No. 3, 2011 pp. 252-258 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1471-4175 DOI 10.1108/14714171111148990

Introduction Since the advent of the personal computer, the last 50 years has witnessed an information/digital revolution which has evolved at such a phenomenal rate and shows no signs of slowing down. This revolution is very much comparable with that of the industrial revolution in shaping our world and is becoming embedded in our culture. The Millennium Bug is a prime example where governments made substantial investments to avoid a digital Armageddon which in the end never materialised. However, ICT has evolved to become a strategic asset for business in delivering productivity improvements and along with socioeconomic development and growth (European Commission, 2006). In addition, the emergence of such technological advancements as business systems and applications, visualisation, communications, the internet, mobile/smart/android devices, social networking and most recently virtualisation and cloud computing form a fundamental part of this evolution.

So what has this meant for the construction industry? As an industry, it represents one of the major contributors to the economies of most nations across the globe along with wealth creation and therefore plays an extremely important role in economic development. In recent times, the industry has continually been criticised for its poor performance and efciency, and failure to deliver value to the client (Latham, 1994; Egan, 1998, 2002). Furthermore, its approach to ICT investment and adoption has also been perceived by business executives as purely a utility tool that is owned and managed by their ICT departments, rather than being an enabler for delivering strategic value to the business (Antoniou and van Harmelen, 2008). On the other hand, while the industry has continued to signicantly invest in ICT over the decades with substantial growth in real terms since the 1990s (60 per cent in the UK), it still remains positioned relatively close to the bottom when compared to other industries such as education, business services, nance, transport and utilities, which has been attributed to low barriers to entry, low prot margins and others particular to the nature of the construction sector (France et al., 2010). In this respect, ICT investments are also strongly affected by overall economic conditions. For example, in late 2007 and early 2008, the world witnessed an economic crisis emerge which was described as the most serious nancial crisis since the Great Depression. An inevitable drastic decline in construction output followed, which in turn resulted in businesses having to adopt urgent survival measures of reviewing all aspects of their business overheads and operating expenditure, of which ICT represents a signicant proportion. Together with nations radically addressing their national debts, organisations are now facing the challenge of making essential economies without compromising operating performance along with enabling some essential ICT development and infrastructure modernisation activities that are imperative to future cost-effective delivery of ICT services to the organisation (France et al., 2010). Notwithstanding this, the current economic climate is providing a period of real opportunity for organisations to re-examine their business practices together with assessing the effectiveness and usage of their ICT systems. In this respect, construction organisations are now in the process of looking towards rapidly maturing technologies such as virtualisation and cloud computing in the provision of cheaper, more exible and commoditised ICT infrastructure services to directly drive business efciencies (France et al., 2010). Other industries are demonstrating that combined cost savings can be achieved of up to 35 per cent through a range of modernisation measures, including the consolidation of data centres and full utilisation of virtualisation technologies. In addition, recent IDC cloud research (Turner, 2011; Middleton and Pucciarelli, 2010) has highlighted that worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $16 billion in 2009 and is forecast to reach $55.5 billion in 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 27.4 per cent. This rapid growth rate is over ve times the projected growth for traditional IT products (5 per cent). Building Information Modelling and Management (BIM-M) is another key area that offers signicant opportunities for revolutionising the sector by enabling seamless processes that support the complete lifecycle of the facility, embedding a model-based approach, full information co-ordination and management. While BIM-M has been in existence in one carnation or another for over 30 years, it is only in the last decade that BIM-M has really begun to receive serious attention particularly, from industry and also at a governmental level, which is continuing to gather momentum. BIM-M is currently

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being employed across the globe on a variety of projects at varied levels of adoption, and within various types of organisations from prime contracting and large consulting organisations to small architectural practices. Clients are now also becoming aware of the potential for BIM-M at the post-occupancy stage in delivering real value. More recently, government clients across the globe including the USA, Denmark, Finland and the UK have begun to implement national initiatives/strategies as a statement of intent for driving BIM-M forward through the procurement of public projects towards establishing industry-wide adoption, which is further contributing to progressing the modernisation of the industry (Bew and Underwood, 2010). The philosophy that lies behind BIM-M stemmed from four dimensions in relation to the management of building information and these have been agreed by the industry over the last two decades. These dimensions can be summarised as enabling (i) model-based management of (ii) shared building information, which provides (iii) meaningful data about a building/facility in a (iv) standardised way. Building Information Modelling and Management BIM-M can be dened as the information management process and strategy which covers the whole lifecycle of a building (from conception to demolition) and mainly focuses on enabling and facilitating the integrated way of project ow and delivery through the collaborative use of semantically rich 3D digital building models in all stages of the project and building lifecycle (Underwood and Isikdag, 2010). BIM-M is a model-oriented information management strategy that benets from the use of BIMs. BIMs can be described as the set of shared 3D digital building models that provide geometric and semantic information about building (and building elements). BIMs form an information backbone through the buildings lifecycle. BIM-M has become a popular research eld by addressing the problems related to the inefcient sharing of information and collaboration throughout the lifecycle of a building. Although the main role of BIMs is recognised as facilitating the design phase of a construction project, BIM can have a wide range of functions such as linking indoor and outdoor urban spaces, facilitating information sharing between various stakeholders of a construction project and the software applications they use, enabling the use and management of shared building information, facilitating the simulation of construction processes, enabling analysis supporting the design and construction of environment friendly/energy-efcient buildings, and supporting emergency response operations. However, the implementation of BIM-M strategy has a long way to go until it reaches maturity, but this is improving. In this respect, the four newly emerging dimensions in management of building information towards transforming BIM to BIM 2.0 requires enabling an (i) integrated environment of (ii) distributed information which is always (iii) up-to-date and open for (iv) derivation of new information. Various information technologies can facilitate this new focus such as cloud computing, sensor networks, stateless web services and semantic webs. Cloud computing Virtualisation refers to, creating and using virtual versions of all ICT resources such as hardware infrastructures, software, le storage and networks. In order to generate cost savings, organisations are rapidly moving towards using virtual hardware,

operating systems and storage devices. Current trend of growth in virtualisation technologies indicates that most of the future ICT services will depend on the virtual clones of hardware and software. When virtualisation technology is made available through the internet, it is often referred to as cloud computing, where the term indicates the use of internet (i.e. the cloud) for managing highly scalable and customisable virtual hardware and software resources (services). Cloud computing builds upon decades of research in virtualisation, distributed computing, grid computing, utility computing, and more recently, networking, web and software services. It implies a service-oriented architecture (SOA), reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, greater exibility, reduced total cost of ownership (Vouk, 2008). Cloud computing today is broken down into three segments as providing software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). In the SaaS approach, users rent software from a service provider which hosts the software in a centralised network server, and they use this software on demand. PaaS provides an environment specically to the application developers for developing, testing and hosting their applications. IaaS offers users a complete virtual hardware and software platform (i.e. a virtual server) that can be managed over the cloud. The construction industry can benet from cloud computing, mostly by making use of the SaaS approach and data centre virtualisation. Applications used in various stages of the buildings lifecycle would be leveraged through a distributed environment (i.e. offered as software services), and the information backbone of the construction project or building (i.e. BIMs) would reside in a virtual data centre (and offered as a data service). Future research in this eld should therefore focus on integration to create seamlessly integrated data and application services for BIMs. Sensor networks Recent developments in the eld of BIM-M have shown that BIMs are very successful in presenting semantic information about building elements along with their geometric representation. In essence, by querying a BIM, one can understand a rectangular prism visualised in a CAD application, which is not simply a rectangular box, but for example a column made up of concrete which is residing in the second oor of a building that will be used for residential purposes, i.e. the information in a BIM is meaningful. Similarly, one can get meaningful information about doors, windows, heating, ventilation and air conditioning elements and so on by using BIMs in the building information infrastructures. Although the information in BIMs is meaningful, it in fact becomes stateless after the construction of the building has been completed. In other words, a BIM user can nd out whether a door in a building is constructed of timber, if the door has been constructed (or not) on a given date. The new buzzword wireless sensor network (WSN) refers to a web of distributed autonomous sensors that are continually monitoring physical and environmental conditions. A WSN is made up of individual nodes (i.e. motes), each capable of collecting information and communicating with other motes. Sensor networks are typically self-organising, meaning that information collected from one mote will nd its way to the networks central computer by hopping from mote to mote over the most efcient path. The data can be collected continuously, unobtrusively and in harsh conditions for a long period of time (Abernathy, 2011). In the context of BIM-M, the distributed sensors and WSNs can monitor conditions such as temperature, gas levels, pollutants, humidity, state of doors and windows

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(i.e. being open/closed and so on), occupancies in rooms and conditions of different systems working within a building/facility. Sensors in the WSNs (when embedded into tiny microcontroller cards) are now capable of publishing atomic web feeds regarding the condition they monitor (without requiring any other hardware resources). Furthermore, the information provided by the sensors when integrated with the building information infrastructures becomes very valuable in transforming meaningful building information into meaningful and full state information which is more accurate and up-to-date. Stateless web services SOAs and stateless web services offers opportunities for making building information full state (i.e. real time, accurate and up-to-date). In addition, SOAs can also serve for derivability of information, as information can be exposed as a part of service contracts within applications. SOAs consist of web services that can be dened as data or application interfaces which users can reach by using agreed contracts and standard messages. Two denitive characteristics of web services are loose coupling and network transparency (Pulier and Taylor, 2006). Web services are loosely coupled, i.e. when a piece of software has been exposed as a web service it is simple to move it to another computer as the service functions are independent of the client application that is using the service. On the other hand, as web services consumers and providers send messages to each other using open internet protocols, web services offer total network transparency (i.e. the location of the web service will not have an impact on its function). Stateless web services (i.e. representational state transfer) are built upon resources (i.e. anything that is available digitally over the web), their names (identied by uniform indicators, i.e. URIs) representations (i.e. metadata/data on the current state of the resource) and links between the representations. In stateless web services, each client request is treated as an independent transaction, and the service does not store information regarding the client that makes the request. By eliminating the need for storing the state of clients, the performance of the servers increases, while stateless transactions allow the exposition of web services with minimum hardware requirements (i.e. by microcontroller cards containing sensors). Vast amounts of data coming from BIMs, and micro (atomic) feeds from WSNs can together be exposed as stateless web services, and generating data mash-ups from these resources would be very straightforward. In summary, stateless web services offers opportunities to integrate distributed building information (in the cloud), and provide an environment where a mass of new information can be derived. Semantic web If this mass of new information (derived from multiple resources) can be restructured in compliance with semantic web standards and supported by well-built ontologies, i.e. formal specications of conceptualisations, which consist of nite list of terms and the relationships between these terms (Antoniou and van Harmelen, 2008), semantic queries such as Would you provide me the number of working elevators and escalators in the Empire State Building between 12.00-14.00?, or Would you provide me the average CO2 level in top 20 oors of ve of the highest buildings in London? or Please provide me the difference between temperatures in my hotel room in Singapore Marina Bay, and my ofce in Sydney. can be answered. Although today the pioneering

semantic search engine WolframAlpha (WolframAlpha, 2011) is capable of calculating the required ventilation ow rate for a residential building based on the semantic query Provide indoor air quality for a 3 bedroom house of 200 m2 as 23.77 litres per second, real-time information provided by sensor networks needs to be integrated with BIMs for supporting the queries presented (i.e. regarding the buildings in New York, London, Singapore and Sydney). The success rate in responses to the (presented) semantic queries will therefore depend on: . the level of integration of distributed building information; . the level success in derivation of information mass from multiple loosely coupled resources (which are exposed as web services); and nally . how well the query can be interpreted and, reasoning/search and retrieval can be accomplished upon the interpreted query. Information structured in compliance with Resource Description Framework metadata framework (i.e. in form of N-triples) will help in retrieving more meaningful answers to the semantic queries. In summary therefore, the focus of BIM-M is now becoming broader as the information management paradigm shifts from enabling (i) model-based management of (ii) shared building information, which provides (iii) meaningful data about a building in a (iv) standardised way (i.e. BIM 1.0), to enable an (i) integrated environment of (ii) distributed information which is always (iii) up-to-date and open for (iv) derivation of new information (i.e. BIM 2.0). Technologies such as cloud computing, sensor networks, stateless web services and semantic web, may be the new facilitators of this paradigm shift. For the construction industry, there is still a long way to go and much to do in terms of realising the full potential of these emerging technologies in line with the efciencies and performance improvement that are being witnessed in other sectors. However, as both the technologies and industry matures, progressive improvements towards BIM 2.0 offer several benets for subsequent exploitation.

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References Abernathy, D. (2011), Teaching the geoweb: interdisciplinary undergraduate research in wireless sensor networks, web mapping, and geospatial data management, Journal of Geography, Vol. 110 No. 1, pp. 27-31. Antoniou, G. and van Harmelen, F. (2008), A Semantic Web Primer, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Bew, M. and Underwood, J. (2010), Delivering BIM to the UK market, in Underwoord, J. and Isikdag, U. (Eds), Handbook of Research on Building Information Modelling and Construction Informatics: Concepts and Technologies, IGI Global, Hershey, PA. Egan, J. (1998), Rethinking Construction: The Report from Construction Task Force, Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, London. Egan, J. (2002), Rethinking Construction: Accelerating Change, Strategic Forum for Construction, London. European Commission (2006), ICT uptake, working group 1, ICT Uptake Working Group Draft Outline Report, available at: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/taskforce/wg/wg1_ report.pdf

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France, K., Fox, S., Khosrowshahi, F. and Underwood, J. (2010), Building on IT Survey: Cost Reduction and Cost Effectiveness, Construct IT For Business Report, Construct IT For Business, Salford. Latham, M. (1994), Constructing the Team: Joint Review of the Procurement and Contractual Arrangements in the UK Construction Industry, Final Report, HMSO, London. Middleton, S.G. and Pucciarelli, J.C. (2010), Worldwide Private and Public Cloud Financing 2010-2014 Forecast: Sizing the Cloud Financing Opportunity for Private and Public Cloud, IDC Report, available at: www.idc.com/prodserv/idc_cloud.jsp Pulier, E. and Taylor, H. (2006), Understanding Enterprise SOA, Manning Publications, Greenwich, CT. Turner, M.J. (2010), Worldwide Cloud Systems Management Software 2010-2015 Forecast and Trends, IDC Report, available at: www.idc.com/prodserv/idc_cloud.jsp Underwood, J. and Isikdag, U. (2010), Handbook of Research on Building Information Modelling and Construction Informatics: Concepts and Technologies, IGI Global, Hershey, PA. Vouk, M.A. (2008), Cloud computing issues, research and implementations, Journal of Computing and Information Technology, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 235-46. WolframAlpha (2011), WolframAlpha Computational Knowledge Engine, available at: www. wolframalpha.com Further reading Alshawi, M., Khosrowshahi, F., Goulding, J., Lou, E. and Underwood, J. (2008), Strategic Positioning of IT in Construction: An Industry Leaders Perspective, Construct IT For Business Report, Construct IT For Business, Salford. Corresponding author Umit Isikdag can be contacted at: uisikdag@gmail.com

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