Building Information Modeling (BIM) for existing buildings — Literature review and future needs

TLDR: Results show scarce BIM implementation in existing buildings yet, due to challenges of (1) high modeling/conversion effort from captured building data into semantic BIM objects, (2) updating of information in BIM and (3) handling of uncertain data, objects and relations in B IM occurring inexisting buildings.

About: This article is published in Automation in Construction.The article was published on 2014-03-01 and is currently open access. It has received 1499 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Building information modeling & Deconstruction (building).

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Table 1: Examined Journals, classified according to their scope

Table 4: Literature and own suggestions of IFC attribute extensions to describe inaccuracies, uncertainties or future processes and treatments occurring in existing buildings [2,7,35,62,69,79,82,99,130,156]

Figure 6: BIM creation processes for new and existing buildings, partly from Huber et al. [62]

Figure 3: Frequency of reviewed publications per year of publication

Table 6: Exemplary Model View Definitions (MVD) for BIM functionalities in IFC2x3 format; others can be found in [168]

Figure 8: Systematic review of object recognition approaches applied in existing buildings [30,31,40,43,61,63,77,110,111,189,193,211–213]

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Building information modeling (bim) for existing buildings – literature review and future needs" ?

This paper presents a review of over recent 180 publications on the topic. 

Q2. What are the future works mentioned in the paper "Building information modeling (bim) for existing buildings – literature review and future needs" ?

Although some sustainability ratings already include some end-of-life considerations [ 247,248 ], BIM might be used to integrate monitored values such as energy consumption, waste water, or maintenance costs into their rating or to extend current assessment criteria with regard to recyclability or other end-of-life considerations on component level. But future research approaches could also include material- or texture-based recognition [ 151 ] and non-destructive testing methods such as ground penetrating radars, radiography, magnetic particle inspection, sonars or electro-magnetic waves [ 205 ] or tags installed during retrofits to increase information richness in BIM. And further capacity developments in this area are expected to facilitate BIM implementation e. g. through cloud computing, sensor networks or semantic web approaches [ 150,179 ]. To cope with these issues and to reduce time and cost, the integration of monitoring and capturing methods into BIM seems promising to keep BIM information automatically up-to-date. 

Q3. What are the major challenges in new buildings?

Major challenges in new buildings refer to change from design-bid-build processes to integrated project delivery (IPD) and to the increased time effort and knowledge required for BIM use. 

Q4. What motivates the architecture, engineering, construction, facility management and deconstruction 1 communities to manage?

Resource scarcity, sustainability challenges and stricter decrees for recycling and resource efficiency in buildings [1] motivate the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Facility Management (FM) and Deconstruction 1 communities to manage resources efficiently [2]. 

Q5. Why is BIM often not applied in existing buildings?

Due to a mainly interactive and time-consuming data capturing, processing and creation process, BIM modeling effort is high and thus BIM is often not applied in existing buildings yet. 

Q6. What are the main benefits of using BIM in building management?

Major benefits consist in design consistency and visualization, cost estimations, clash detection, implementation of lean construction or improved stakeholder collaboration. 

Q7. What are the main reasons why BIM is needed in existing buildings?

As stakeholders, their interests and required processes (e.g. bidding and procurement) vary from planning and construction to maintenance and deconstruction LC stages, adaption of legal frameworks would be necessary if BIM is applied in existing buildings. 

Q8. What is the way to create an as-built BIM?

If a reliable data capture technique could provide an as-built BIM at reasonable time and cost [19,42,62,65,152,153], existing buildings could benefit from BIM usage e.g. regarding documentation, visualization or facility management. 

Q9. What are the main issues that are not accounted for in the BIM?

Ecological issues are not accounted for, like resource efficiency, potentially achievable recycling qualities or recycling rates (recyclability), ability of dismantling component connections, separability of material layers and composites, deconstructions ' emissions or immissions (such as noise, dust, vibrations), or respective protection measures that could be simulated or optimized through BIM. 

Q10. What is the important information needed for building management?

Apart from contact and general building information, detailed data on installed components and equipment is needed such as service zones, installation dates, installation type, vendor/manufacturer, geometries and exact location, materials and compositions, physical properties, warranties, as well as maintenance history since completion [11,12]. 

Q11. What are the other potential BIM functionalities that are not covered yet?

other potential BIM functionalities are not covered yet like deconstruction execution planning and progress tracking, recycling and rubble management, secondary component and raw material auctions, recycling network logistics, monitoring of hazardous components or automated reporting to authorities. 

Q12. What are the main reasons why the construction sector is shifting to building modifications, retrofits and?

Especially in industrialized countries with low new construction rates, activities of the construction sector increasingly shift to building modifications, retrofits and deconstruction of existing buildings [3,4]. 

Q13. Why did architects, engineers and contractors dominate the elaboration of BIM functionalities?

Due to the former development of BIM, architects, engineers and contractors played a major role as early adopters of BIM technology and still dominate the elaboration of BIM functionalities [15] and dissemination [7]. 

Q14. Why do architects, engineers and contractors dominate the elaboration of BIM?

Due to the former BIM development, architects, engineers and contractors play a major role as early adopters of BIM technology and still dominate the elaboration of BIMfunctionalities [15] and BIM dissemination [7]. 

Q15. What is the way to model building components?

E.g. concealed building components like ducts, pipes, conduits or plumbing (HVAC/MEP) can only be modeled with high user input yet [40].