...through the General Services Administration, the barriers to the necessary sharing of data between project participants contractually fall to let information flow.

GSA, manages a portfolio of 342 million sq ft of owned or leased space in 8,900 buildings worth $500 billion for the federal government. In 2003, it established the National 3D-4D-BIM Program, that firmly, but gradually pushes its construction-industry partners toward ever more inclusive modeling.

“We want our project teams to realize that there is a progression from 2D to 3D, 4D and BIM,” says Calvin Kam, GSA’s manager for the program. While 3D makes a valuable contribution to communications, “it’s only part of the BIM concept,” he says. “Projects often benefit from 3D presentation and integrating models for design coordination. However, our experience is that such integration examples often lack information—the “I” in BIM [for] modeling, sharing, or optimization.”

In particular, GSA now is using BIM to simulate energy consumption of facilities; and to automatically apply industry standard and GSA business rules to compute area measurements. “For the BIM approach to succeed, our experience is that there should be a value proposition and/or business incentives for all contributing stakeholders,” Kam says. “That may include better quality of energy or area calculations, efficiency gain in professional services, better competitive advantage, and compensation, etc.” 

GSA requires a spatial BIM to be the minimum requirement for final concept approvals for all GSA projects receiving design funding beginning in FY2007.  “When project conditions are appropriate, we encourage all projects to leverage 3D, 4D, and BIM deployments beyond spatial program validation,” Kam says.

“We have aligned 3D, 4D and BIM with over 40 capital projects across the nation in the past three years,” says Kam. “Through these project implementations, we have gained insights into the business value of BIM, the definition of contractual clauses, the importance of defining clear and realistic technology requirements, as well as the communications with different stakeholders.” Kam says GSA is working closely with the design/construction community, BIM vendors and standard/professional organizations to phase in the adoption of 3D, 4D, and BIM technologies “in a strategic and incremental manner.”

The early adopters say getting virtual design and construction right can turn interesting exercises with sporadic value into supermodels that can significantly reduce costs, optimize efforts and generate stunningly understandable visual tools that convey vast amounts of process and relational information at a glance.

Photo:Accu-Crete Inc.

Concrete workers, plumbers and foremen get daily briefings on Accu-Crete jobs.

That delivery can come from a bank of displays and servers in the Computer Analysis Visualization Environment (CAVE) of a global player like PB, or it can be projected to a subcontractor’s crew from a laptop in a job trailer. It is not about flashy good looks, but rather information value.

“We see [CIFE] members doing exciting new work using Virtual Design and Construction methods,” says CIFE’s Fischer. He cites Accu-Crete Inc., an Alexandria, Va.-based concrete sub that has brought VDC to the jobsite.

Adding Value

After working through a string of pilots, Accu-Crete has taken its high-end visualization tools to the job trailer at an apartment complex construction project in Daniel Island, S.C., where a VDC engineer —CIFE Visiting Fellow Claudio Mourgues—prepares 8-hour work packages for each day’s work.

Photo:Accu-Crete Inc.

On Accu-Crete projects, digital visualization helps concrete workers drill holes for plumbers in framing.

Supervisors for the concrete, plumbing and framing crews and some workers meet each morning in a “virtual huddle” to review the work scheduled for the day. They study 3D models of the day’s construction and fly through details drilled from time-lapsed projections of the objects they will install.

“The virtual huddles really work,” says Accu-Crete owner and president David Hudgens. He says the visualization of each day’s process by everyone “at the work face” blows away impediments to communication and understanding. These include difficulties interpreting 2D drawings and language barriers. It also helps build a cross-trained work force. “It’s facilitating our reengagement with our work force,” Hudgens says.

Fischer concludes VDC is coming into its own. But he predicts that it will “sing” when the people directly in the design and construction process use it as a core tool, the work force demands it, owners orchestrate projects to leverage its communication and coordination benefits and software vendors provide easy ways to use the data in VDC models.

“VDC will sing,” Fischer adds, “when it is not only used on large projects and industrial projects, but when it’s used for the thousands of ‘small’ projects...that create building value across the U.S.”