Completed Dissertation on BIM and Collaboration

[garethace]

Hi guys, been a while since I have been active in AUGI. Hope everyone is well.

I thought that I might share with you a little piece of research that I carried out over the last two years in relation to coordination and collaboration between multiple disciplines in construction. In the 1990s I studied as a student of architecture and later worked as a structural draughtsman and ended up doing a lot of design coordinator and project management inside of a Design Build contracting firm in Ireland. The recent economic downturn saw me turn back to study again, and this dissertation is part of the products of that work.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/135072288/...rmation-Models

I wrote in with guys like the AUGI members in mind, and attempted to look at some of the best cutting edge research from around the world, into the whole BIM thing and what it will mean in the future. The subject of my course between 2010 and 2013 was in cost control and quantities estimation in construction (Quantity Surveying it is called in Britain and Ireland). I intentionally focussed in on this area of study, because it of all the aspects about construction management, the financial and legal aspects were those which I understood the least. So hopefully, in this dissertation work I am sharing with you, you will come across multiple aspects of BIM, to do with financial, legal and design.

I won't be able to respond extensively to queries on this dissertation, but please do feel free to dissect, dismember or debate the merits or otherwise of the work amongst yourself. The dissertation work was designed to put 'put out there' and opened up like a can of beans, and consumed. The last thing I had in mind, was one of those hard bound items that sit in a glass cabinet for the next 20 years. I'm catching back up to speed in computer aided design and BIM after a hiatus recently, and doing a couple of intensive course. In 2009-ish I was also doing a part time study into energy performance at domestic scale, and that later led to my interest in BIM from a point of view of cost and energy audits. During my course in construction economics I took a speciality route into mechanical and electrical (again, the M&E part was that which I knew least about in the past, and it also ties with with my studies in energy performance going into non-domestic scale construction).

So I have a new found interest in BIM, from a point of view of MEP discipline, as well as architectural and structural. The three years in construction economics and cost control also required me to take a hard look at 4D, 5D and 6D, and the associated digital tools and respective people who live/work with those tools and aspects to construction. I have found to my astonishment in the last few years, that construction as an enterprise is a whole lot more interesting and more sophisticated than I could have ever imagined as an architectural student many years hence.

Regards,
Brian O' Hanlon
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[rthurston]

Brian, I'm so excited to read this. I was wondering when I'd start to see these works pop up in the field.