Industry-Academia Collaboration to develop a BIM-based MEPF Coordination Educational Module

In joint industry-academia collaboration, the authors are developing a prototype educational module to teach students of construction management process-based best practices implementing Building Information Modeling (BIM) to facilitate Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing and Fire Protection (MEPF) coordination. Based on a prominent construction company’s pioneering experience, the prototype teaching module highlights lessons learned coordinating complex, real-world projects, and incorporates hands-on, interactive exercises. The authors document and discuss the development of the module, which strives to illustrate BIM in both theory and practice. The module includes process diagrams, war-stories, dynamic 3D models, and interactive exercises to critically evaluate BIM working processes. Using Adobe Captivate along with a variety of BIM tools, the authors incorporate a demonstration video to highlight the assembly, mapping and visual inspection of several BIM models as developed by a variety of professional project team members. An interactive homework assignment has students investigate hard and soft MEPF clash detetction and coordination issues. The assignment forces students to think critically to identify the source, eliminate redundancy and propose a solution for various clashes. Future work will seek to extend and evovle the MEPF cordination teaching module and to develop additional domainspecific teaching modules related to BIM.