Determination of Significance of 4D-BIM Features

Abstract

Planning is one of the advancements in Building Information Modeling (BIM) domain which enables the practitioner to visualize the relation of time with 3D objects. Notwithstanding the fruitful existing studies, the awareness of the practitioners concerning 4D-BIM features is not sufficient. Moreover, the construction industry suffers from the lack of features of the existing 4D-BIM software. Furthermore, the existing features vary from software to software due to a lack of awareness with respect to the importance of the features of 4D-BIM. These drawbacks result in unsuccessful 4D-BIM applications in the construction industry. Therefore, this study aims to define 4D-BIM features and detect their importance in the construction industry. Hence, 4D-BIM features were detected via an in-depth literature review and a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) conducted with 10 experts. Consequently, 16 4D-BIM features were detected. Later, the features were evaluated by 35 experts who have experience in the 4D-BIM domain, and the obtained data were analyzed via Relative Importance Index (RII) method to detect the significance levels of 4D-BIM features. As a result, the significance level of each feature was found to be greater than 0.5 according to RII method, which indicates that each of the features in 4D-BIM has critical importance in the planning of the project. It is highly believed that this study will pave the way for future 4D-BIM-related studies as well as increase the awareness of the practitioners, software developers and researchers in terms of the current needs of the construction industry.