BIM-Based Method for the Verification of Building Code Compliance

Abstract

Urban planning is a valuable tool for growth control and city development, both to maintain the local urban identity and provide life quality for inhabitants. To regulate it, local governments have defined standards for a proper city’s growth through municipal and detailed urban plans. Such instruments identify a set of rules which constructions and buildings must fulfil for a careful and smooth integration within the urban areas. New projects are required to comply with such rules, and designers must adapt and guarantee that their projects fulfil all the local urban requirements. However, the verification process of construction projects is still a manual procedure and often a time-consuming process, with high possibilities for inaccurate measures. Thus, this paper aims to streamline the verification procedure of construction projects’ code compliance to enhance project design efficiency and save designers time. To do so, the Building Information Modelling (BIM) method will be used through the Dynamo programming software. By creating a Dynamo routine to check the building code and urban plan compliance from Brazilian municipalities, specific BIM models will be automatically analysed to detect and evaluate if it is according to local urban legislation. Results have provided a real-time decision support tool, where designers can assess if their buildings are complying with local urban codes at any time of the design stage, making it easy to innovate and integrate innovative design options, as well as to precisely communicate their buildings’ code compliance. Such a method can also support municipality authorities to verify project compliance, reducing assessment and calculation errors, as well as the required time and bureaucracy for project appraisal.

Evaluation of Construction Project’s Cost Using BIM Technology

“…The research findings also confirmed that the REVIT software could minimize much effort and time required by engineers to assess the budget related to challenging construction projects with higher complexity and components, like this case study. The results of this work are consistent with the research findings of [1][2][3][4], who stated that BIM technology and the REVIT software tool could minimize much of human errors and achieve a higher degree of precision. Also, these results are consistent with the findings of [5][6][7], who reported that the REVIT program could save considerable effort and time that would be significantly consumed by engineers to estimate the construction project cost.…”

“…Due to the rising number of small-, medium-, and largescale construction projects worldwide, and because of the increasing rates of projects' complexity, the estimation process of the budget related to the construction project has become more complicated, effort, and time-consuming, and may contribute to a larger number of human errors [1][2][3][4]. The motivation of this research is reflected in the critical benefits, and substantial contributions of modern constriction techniques like Building Information Modeling (BIM) in helping civil engineers, quantity surveyors, designers, and planners calculate the volume of construction materials with higher degrees of accuracy, less human errors, less effort, and very low amount of time and cost required to make the materials quantity take-off.…”

The Development of an Automated System for a Quality Evaluation of Engineering BIM Models: A Case Study

“…Nguyen and Kim [24] developed a framework for a cooperative building design environment in which every participant in the project can monitor the code compliance status of their respective designs through the use of BIM technology. Villaschi et al [25] proposed a method based on BIM to streamline the verification procedure of code compliance in construction projects. Their findings provided a real-time decision support tool enabling designers to determine whether their buildings comply with local urban codes at any point in the design process.…”

Analyzing the Feasibility of Integrating Urban Sustainability Assessment Indicators with City Information Modelling (CIM)

“…According to the SBTool PT Urban Guide, to calculate this indicator is necessary to sum the areas appropriately used according to their natural potential and make the ratio with the studied area. The requirements for land use and the properties of each area can be added to the digital model using Dynamo [29]. When the areas are defined in the model, a Dynamo routine can be performed for calculation [30].…”