A BIM Approach for the Design of Industrial Warehouses

Abstract

All around the world, the Building Information Modeling (BIM) is transforming the architecture of engineering design and of construction industry. While it is in an early implementation stage in African Sub-saharan Countries, many construction regulators and project owners are beginning to enforce the BIM application from the project design stage to its commissioning. The aim of this research work is to provide an approach for designing industrial warehouses using BIM as it was done in the industrial zone of the Kribi Deep Sea port in Cameroon. The proposed methodology is presented in six steps: definition of BIM general requirements, design of the 3D BIM architectural model, sizing of wall and roof for specific requirements, design of the 3D BIM structural model, coordination of 3D BIM models and interference detection and creation of 4D BIM model. Results obtained from the application of BIM on the design of a warehouse, dedicated to preserve the natural and biological essence of cocoa and coffee products in a hostile marine environment, show that this methodology is easily appropriated and implemented by local design and construction engineers through available engineering software in the local market.

Determination of Significance of 4D-BIM Features

“…The 𝑊 𝑖 expression represents the weight value between 1-5 given by the participants for each feature, the A expression represents the highest weight value (5), and the N expression represents the total number of participants (35). As a result of the given equation, the significance level of each feature was detected as a value between 0 and 1, and the higher the value, the more important the feature is.…”

“…As part of broader digital technologies, BIM provides an opportunity to the construction industry to raise the performance of construction projects via better data integration and project collaboration platform [4]. Being a digital model, BIM enables practitioners to access and share information needed in the life cycle of the building [5]. By the same token, the main essential BIM implementation is the collaboration of numerous stakeholders at different phases of the facility life cycle to add, omit, update or modify the concerning information in the BIM to support and reflect the role of those stakeholders [6].…”