Adaptive minimized communication protocol based on BIM

Abstract

The early conceptual architectural design phases are characterized by a constant interplay of creating variants and assessment of those variants as well as their consistent detailing. Variant comparison plays a significant role in achieving the desired final building. Objectifiable criteria used for the evaluation and comparison of design variants can be used to legitimize decisions and selections as the design process proceeds. Moreover, using these criteria, such as the results of simulations and analysis performed by various domain experts, most likely leads to building designs with better performance. One major challenge in practice today is the management of design information and collaboration between several actors in a building project. A large portion of the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry still deals with conventional methods to exchange design information. The growing use of building information models is promising, but even the most recent developments and practices still rely heavily on human-readable protocols and issue management systems (Beetz 2009;Borrmann et al. 2018). Considering the potential of schematized computer-readable communications to be analyzed and used for future references and case-based reasoning systems, this paper proposes a novel minimized communication protocol based on BIM, which aims to introduce a computer-readable, yet adaptive universal method/function which works on schematized information exchange requirements (templates) for different use cases. Furthermore, this concept will be explained and demonstrated using an example scenario.

BIM-based design decisions documentation using design episodes, explanation tags, and constraints

“…Similarly, collaborations and cooperation between multiple domain experts and stakeholders have proven to be essential for achieving a good and optimal design (Zahedi et al). To deal with this problem, Zahedi and Petzold developed a minimal machine-interpretable communication protocol based on BIM to facilitate the workflow and communicate the proposed detailings and their corresponding evaluation results for supporting the decisionmaking process Zahedi and Petzold, 2019;Meng et al, 2020). Matern and König introduced an approach for managing various design variants across multiple planning stages in a consistent digital building model (Mattern and König, 2018).…”

Interaction with analysis and simulation methods via minimized computer-readable BIM-based communication protocol

“…These adaptive information exchange requirements are called aLODx in our minimized communication protocol and are defined based on the above mentioned multi-LOD meta-model. An aLODx acts as an adaptive lookup table or translation table to which both the architect and domain-expert will refer when communicating based on our minimized communication protocol (Zahedi et al 2019).…”

“…Using this protocol, all communications, variant evaluations, and decision-making will be documented and traceable afterwards for further use cases. Considering the fragmented nature of AEC industry with many small and medium-size companies whose collaborations are mostly limited to the duration of one project, we believe that through machine-readable communica- Each of the arguments that the feedback function receives along with two demonstrative examples for energy analysis and structural analysis has been explained in the following publications (Zahedi et al 2019;Zahedi and Petzold 2019).…”