Evaluating Effects of Building Information Modeling on Reduction of Waste of Time, Cost and Materials in Infrastructure Facility Projects

Abstract

Delay, cost overruns and generation of solid waste in infrastructure projects such as water and wastewater projects in construction industry are considered as important problems in many countries; and, necessity of using new methods by stakeholders would become twice, in managing these types of projects. So, infra-structure projects require changes and improvement to be made in current methods of planning in terms of scheduling, costing, and preventing waste of materials due to their facility nature so that sharing project information during the life cycle would be encouraged in various sectors such as Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Owner-operated (AECO). This way, high volume of construction operations would be prevented; and a mutual understanding would be provided of better performance management, with consideration of stakeholders’ requirements in projects. Many companies active in the field of infrastructure such as water and wastewater are hesitant in making investment on using new technologies; because, they believe that long term usage of traditional methods have led them to dominate the details. For them, a new method not comprehensively tested and proven could be risky both in terms of time and cost. Since Building Information Modeling (BIM) in AEC industry has been proven for residential and commercial projects; the effort would be made to use literature review to identify existing challenges of facility projects. Through this research, capabilities of BIM in providing solutions and reducing problems would be identified and introduced resulting in better understanding of the technology to be applied in facility projects.