Currently, the architecture, engineering, and construction industry is facing enormous technological and institutional changes and challenges including the proliferation of information technology and appropriate application of sustainable practices. The 21st century engineer and architect must be able to deal with a rapid pace of technological change, a highly interconnected world, and complex problems that require multidisciplinary solutions. This paper focuses on research directions and trends around building information modeling (BIM) through interdisciplinary endeavors: how BIM research topics could be explored; their relevancy; and their potential future impact. It identifies BIM research topics that are considered to be important to a wide range of practitioners and future practitioners, both architecture and engineering students. It also assesses the relevance of current research projects to the industry and categorizes future BIM research topics. It aims to formulate research ideas and methodologi...

A building information model (BIM) contains data that can be accessed and exported for other uses during the lifetime of the building especially for facilities management (FM) and operations. Working under the guidance of well-designed BIM guidelines to insure completeness and compatibility with FM software, architects and contractors can deliver an information rich data model that is valuable to the client. Large owners such as universities often provide these detailed guidelines and deliverable requirements to their building teams. Investigation of the University of Southern California (USC) Facilities Management Service’s (FMS) website showed a detailed plan including standards, file names, parameter lists, and other requirements of BIM data, which were specifically designated for facilities management use, as deliverables on new construction projects. Three critical details were also unearthed in the reading of these documents: Revit was the default BIM software; COBie was adapted to help meet facilities management goals; and EcoDomus provided a display of the collected data viewed through Navisworks. Published accounts about the Cinema Arts Complex developed with and under these guidelines reported positive results. Further examination with new projects underway reveal the rapidly changing relational database landscape evident in the new USC “Project Record Revit Requirement Execution Plan (PRxP)”.

INTRODUCTION Although visual programming is being broadly implemented in other disciplines, it has only relatively recently become an important supplement to three-dimensional modeling programs in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. Currently, Grasshopper in conjunction with Rhino is a leading example of a visual programming environment that is strongly supported by a user community that is developing additional functionality, but Grasshopper does not yet work directly with building information modeling (BIM) software. Dynamo is relatively new, but shows considerable promise in becoming a constructive tool to complement BIM, 3D modeling, and analysis programs because it includes parametric geometries and works with Revit, a leading BIM software program. Three case studies are described: extensibility of Dynamo through the use of a building energy simulation package, controlling a virtual model's response through light level sensors, and interactively updating shading components for a...

Green buildings should respect nature and endeavor to mitigate harmful effects to the environment and occupants. This is often interpreted as creating sustainable sites, consuming less energy and water, reusing materials, and providing excellent indoor environmental quality. Environmentally friendly buildings should also consider literally the impact that they have on birds, millions of them. A major factor in bird collisions with buildings is the choice of building materials. These choices are usually made by the architect who may not be aware of the issue or may be looking for guidance from certification programs such as LEED. As a proof of concept for an educational tool, we developed a software-assisted approach to characterize whether a proposed building design would earn a point for the LEED Pilot Credit 55: Avoiding Bird Collisions. Using the visual programming language Dynamo with the common building information modeling software Revit, we automated the assessment of designs. The approach depends on parameters that incorporate assessments of bird threat for façade materials, analyzes building geometry relative to materials, and processes user input on building operation to produce the assessment.

Scientific visualization has been an essential process in the engineering field, enabling the tracking of large-scale simulation data and providing intuitive and comprehendible graphs and models that display useful data. For computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data, the need for scientific visualization is even more important given the complicated spatial data structure and large quantities of data points characteristic of CFD data. To better take advantage of CFD results for buildings, the potential use of virtual reality (VR) techniques cannot be overlooked in the development of building projects. However, the workflow required to bring CFD simulation results to VR has not been streamlined. Building information modeling (BIM) as a lifecycle tool for buildings includes as much information as possible for further applications. To this end, this study brings CFD visualization to VR using BIM tools and reports the evaluation and analysis of the results.