A SWOT analysis on the implementation of Building Information Models within the Geospatial Environment

Building Information Models as product models and Building Information Modelling as a process which supports information management throughout the lifecycle of a building are becoming more widely used in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry. In order to facilitate various urban management tasks (such as evacuation operations) and several processes of the construction life cycle(such as site selection) through better automation, information related to buildings needs to be represented in the geospatial environment, i.e. in form of geospatial information. Recent research in the field demonstrated that Building Information Models can be used as the information source when transferring building information into the geospatial environment. In fact although recent efforts have been successful in demonstrating the applicability of this information transfer, most of these efforts were not successful in, bringing up the industrial needs for the implementation, presenting the opportunities that the implementation might bring to the AEC and urban management domains and outlining the technical difficulties of the implementation. The review presented in this paper first focuses on outlining the strengths and weaknesses of using BIMs when acquiring building information and transferring it into the geospatial environment. The review later presents opportunities and threats this implementation might bring to AEC and Urban Management domains. industry, ranging from three dimensional cityscape visualisations to management of vehicles in the construction site. In order to effectively automate, some urban management tasks and several processes in the construction life cycle, information related to buildings, needs to be represented in the geospatial environment, i.e. in form of geospatial information. Several tasks of urban management such as emergency response management and indoor navigation and some processes in the construction life cycle, like site selection (i.e. selection of the land plot for a designed project) can be facilitated through the use of certain and sometimes high amount of, geometrical and semantic information about a buildings within the geospatial environment. Isikdag (2006) stated that although the BIMs contain geometrical and semantic information about the building elements in an object oriented data structure, the information in BIMs can not be easily transferred into the geospatial environment, due to technological barriers. These barriers have risen as building information and geospatial information models (are developed for different purposes, by researchers coming from different backgrounds, in result they) represent, handle and threat the data in different ways. These barriers in turn, prevented a better or full automation of several processes in the construction life cycle and in urban management. Until recent years, the transfer of ‘3D geometrical and associated semantic information’ from building models to the geospatial environment could not be accomplished. This was mainly because of, the lack of ability to store semantic information and the lack of object oriented data structures, in standard CAD models. In contrast, today BIMs (i.e. IFC, as a maturing standard), are capable of containing geometrical and semantic information about the building elements, in an object oriented data structure. In last three years, there have been various successful academic and industrial efforts to simplify BIMs and implement them within the geospatial context. These efforts will be elaborated in the following section. Although these efforts have been successful in demonstrating the technical aspect of the applicability of the implementation, most of these were not very successful neither in underlining the needs for the implementation, nor in presenting the opportunities that the implementation might bring to the AEC and urban management domains. The review that will be presented in this paper, will focus on a SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/ Threats) analysis, in order to identify the needs for such an implementation, outline the opportunities it might bring, and point out the weaknesses and threats that might limit the applicability of such an implementation.