Coordination Guidelines for Virtual Design and Construction

Over the past decade the use of BIM in the AEC industry has grown several fold and with it the number of standards available for implementing BIM. The ‘National BIM Standard’ by buildSmart Alliance, the ‘Contractor Guide to BIM’ by the Associated General Contractors of America, the ‘BIM Project Execution Planning Guide and Templates’ from Penn State University, the ‘BIM Roadmap’ by the US Army Corps of Engineers are some of the several BIM guidelines that are currently available to the AEC industry practitioners. Some of these guidelines are as comprehensive as defining BIM and the associated taxonomy while others are meant to be used on an individual project basis. From a contractor’s perspective one of the key benefits of using BIM is for the purpose of collision detection and coordination. This research has found that currently available guidelines do not address these issues adequately. For instance, the currently available guidelines do not allow the subcontractor to quickly communicate issues such as naming conventions and color schemes within the model, to the general contractor. Consequently general contractors and sub-contractors find themselves making changes to their BIM deliverables based on each other’s abilities and levels of adoption, apart from reason’s stemming from use of different software platforms. This paper describes how a group of contractors and subcontractors from Atlanta and Birmingham in the United States came together to create and adopt a ‘Coordination Guidelines for Virtual Design and Construction’. These guidelines were specifically created with the purpose of streamlining the construction coordination process using BIM. This paper describes how the guidelines created differ from other guidelines currently available in the industry.