Construction Innovation

Emerging technologies for BIM 2.0

Jason Underwood Umit Isikdag
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CI EDITORIAL
11,3
Emerging technologies
for BIM 2.0
252
Jason Underwood
University of Salford, Salford, UK, and
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Umit Isikdag
Beykent University, Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to present a new perspective regarding how newly emerging ICT may
have an impact on Building Information Modelling and Management (BIM-M); specifically, towards
enabling the next generation of (full state) BIMs.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a literature and technology review, and
articulates a novel vision for the future of BIM. It starts with exploring how ICT has had an impact on
shaping and modernising the sector, compared to the “traditional”, “archaic” and “draconian” heritage.
The paper elaborates on the current interpretation of BIM-M and emerging technologies that may
change this interpretation from a semantic model to a full state digital building model evolving
through the lifecycle of a building.
Findings – The vision presented in this paper underlines the focus that BIM-M is now becoming
broader, as the information management paradigm shifts from enabling model-based management
of shared building information, which provides meaningful data about a building in a standardised
way (i.e. BIM 1.0), to enable an integrated environment of distributed information which is always up to
date and open for derivation of new information (i.e. BIM 2.0). Technologies such as cloud computing,
sensor networks, stateless web services and semantic web are presented as the new facilitators of this
paradigm shift.
Originality/value – This paper provides value by stipulating a new vision (i.e. BIM 2.0) for BIM-M
and BIM (in particular) in light of emerging technologies such as cloud computing, sensor networks
and semantic webs.
Keywords Buildings, Information technology, Modelling
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
Since the advent of the personal computer, the last 50 years has witnessed
an “information/digital” revolution which has evolved at such a phenomenal rate
and shows no signs of slowing down. This revolution is very much comparable with
that of the industrial revolution in shaping our world and is becoming embedded
in our culture. The “Millennium Bug” is a prime example where governments made
substantial investments to avoid a “digital Armageddon” which in the end never
materialised. However, ICT has evolved to become a strategic asset for business in
delivering productivity improvements and along with socioeconomic development and
Construction Innovation growth (European Commission, 2006). In addition, the emergence of such technological
Vol. 11 No. 3, 2011
pp. 252-258 advancements as business systems and applications, visualisation, communications,
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited the internet, mobile/smart/android devices, social networking and most recently
1471-4175
DOI 10.1108/14714171111148990 virtualisation and cloud computing form a fundamental part of this evolution.
 So what has this meant for the construction industry? As an industry, it represents Emerging
one of the major contributors to the economies of most nations across the globe along technologies
with wealth creation and therefore plays an extremely important role in economic
development. In recent times, the industry has continually been criticised for its poor for BIM 2.0
performance and efficiency, and failure to deliver value to the client (Latham, 1994;
Egan, 1998, 2002). Furthermore, its approach to ICT investment and adoption has also
been perceived by business executives as purely a utility tool that is owned and 253
managed by their ICT departments, rather than being an enabler for delivering strategic
value to the business (Antoniou and van Harmelen, 2008). On the other hand, while the
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industry has continued to significantly invest in ICT over the decades with substantial
growth in real terms since the 1990s (60 per cent in the UK), it still remains positioned
relatively close to the bottom when compared to other industries such as education,
business services, finance, transport and utilities, which has been attributed to low
barriers to entry, low profit margins and others particular to the nature of the
construction sector (France et al., 2010). In this respect, ICT investments are also
strongly affected by overall economic conditions. For example, in late 2007 and early
2008, the world witnessed an economic crisis emerge which was described as the most
serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. An inevitable drastic decline in
construction output followed, which in turn resulted in businesses having to adopt
urgent survival measures of reviewing all aspects of their business overheads and
operating expenditure, of which ICT represents a significant proportion. Together with
nations radically addressing their national debts, organisations are now facing the
challenge of making essential economies without compromising operating performance
along with enabling some essential ICT development and infrastructure modernisation
activities that are imperative to future cost-effective delivery of ICT services to the
organisation (France et al., 2010). Notwithstanding this, the current economic climate is
providing a period of real opportunity for organisations to re-examine their business
practices together with assessing the effectiveness and usage of their ICT systems.
In this respect, construction organisations are now in the process of looking
towards rapidly maturing technologies such as virtualisation and cloud computing
in the provision of cheaper, more flexible and commoditised ICT infrastructure
services to directly drive business efficiencies (France et al., 2010). Other industries are
demonstrating that combined cost savings can be achieved of up to 35 per cent through
a range of modernisation measures, including the consolidation of data centres and full
utilisation of virtualisation technologies. In addition, recent IDC cloud research
(Turner, 2011; Middleton and Pucciarelli, 2010) has highlighted that worldwide
revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $16 billion in 2009 and is forecast to
reach $55.5 billion in 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 27.4 per cent.
This rapid growth rate is over five times the projected growth for traditional IT
products (5 per cent).
Building Information Modelling and Management (BIM-M) is another key area that
offers significant opportunities for revolutionising the sector by enabling seamless
processes that support the complete lifecycle of the facility, embedding a model-based
approach, full information co-ordination and management. While BIM-M has been in
existence in one carnation or another for over 30 years, it is only in the last decade that
BIM-M has really begun to receive serious attention particularly, from industry and also
at a governmental level, which is continuing to gather momentum. BIM-M is currently
 CI being employed across the globe on a variety of projects at varied levels of adoption, and
11,3 within various types of organisations from prime contracting and large consulting
organisations to small architectural practices. Clients are now also becoming aware of
the potential for BIM-M at the post-occupancy stage in delivering real value. More
recently, government clients across the globe including the USA, Denmark, Finland and
the UK have begun to implement national initiatives/strategies as a statement of intent
254 for driving BIM-M forward through the procurement of public projects towards
establishing industry-wide adoption, which is further contributing to progressing the
modernisation of the industry (Bew and Underwood, 2010).
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The philosophy that lies behind BIM-M stemmed from four dimensions in
relation to the management of building information and these have been agreed by the
industry over the last two decades. These dimensions can be summarised as enabling
(i) model-based management of (ii) shared building information, which provides
(iii) meaningful data about a building/facility in a (iv) standardised way.

Building Information Modelling and Management

BIM-M can be defined as the information management process and strategy which
covers the whole lifecycle of a building (from conception to demolition) and mainly
focuses on enabling and facilitating the integrated way of project flow and delivery
through the collaborative use of semantically rich 3D digital building models in all
stages of the project and building lifecycle (Underwood and Isikdag, 2010). BIM-M is a
model-oriented information management strategy that benefits from the use of BIMs.
BIMs can be described as the set of shared 3D digital building models that provide
geometric and semantic information about building (and building elements). BIMs
form an information backbone through the building’s lifecycle. BIM-M has become a
popular research field by addressing the problems related to the inefficient sharing of
information and collaboration throughout the lifecycle of a building. Although the
main role of BIMs is recognised as facilitating the design phase of a construction
project, BIM can have a wide range of functions such as linking indoor and outdoor
urban spaces, facilitating information sharing between various stakeholders of a
construction project and the software applications they use, enabling the use and
management of shared building information, facilitating the simulation of construction
processes, enabling analysis supporting the design and construction of environment
friendly/energy-efficient buildings, and supporting emergency response operations.
However, the implementation of BIM-M strategy has a long way to go until it reaches
maturity, but this is improving.
In this respect, the four newly emerging dimensions in management of building
information towards transforming BIM to BIM 2.0 requires enabling an (i) integrated
environment of (ii) distributed information which is always (iii) up-to-date and open for
(iv) derivation of new information. Various information technologies can facilitate this
new focus such as cloud computing, sensor networks, stateless web services and
semantic webs.

Cloud computing
Virtualisation refers to, creating and using virtual versions of all ICT resources such
as hardware infrastructures, software, file storage and networks. In order to generate
cost savings, organisations are rapidly moving towards using virtual hardware,
 operating systems and storage devices. Current trend of growth in virtualisation Emerging
technologies indicates that most of the future ICT services will depend on the virtual technologies
clones of hardware and software. When virtualisation technology is made available
through the internet, it is often referred to as cloud computing, where the term indicates for BIM 2.0
the use of internet (i.e. the cloud) for managing highly scalable and customisable virtual
hardware and software resources (services). Cloud computing builds upon decades of
research in virtualisation, distributed computing, “grid computing”, “utility 255
computing”, and more recently, “networking”, “web and software services”. It implies
a service-oriented architecture (SOA), reduced information technology overhead for the
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end-user, greater flexibility, reduced total cost of ownership (Vouk, 2008). Cloud
computing today is broken down into three segments as providing “software as a service
(SaaS)”, “platform as a service (PaaS)” and “infrastructure as a service (IaaS)”. In the
SaaS approach, users rent software from a service provider which hosts the software in a
centralised network server, and they use this software on demand. PaaS provides an
environment specifically to the application developers for developing, testing and
hosting their applications. IaaS offers users a complete virtual hardware and software
platform (i.e. a virtual server) that can be managed over the cloud. The construction
industry can benefit from cloud computing, mostly by making use of the SaaS approach
and data centre virtualisation. Applications used in various stages of the building’s
lifecycle would be leveraged through a distributed environment (i.e. offered as software
services), and the information backbone of the construction project or building (i.e. BIMs)
would reside in a virtual data centre (and offered as a data service). Future research in
this field should therefore focus on integration to create seamlessly integrated data and
application services for BIMs.

Sensor networks
Recent developments in the field of BIM-M have shown that BIMs are very successful in
presenting semantic information about building elements along with their geometric
representation. In essence, by querying a BIM, one can understand a rectangular prism
visualised in a CAD application, which is not simply a rectangular box, but for example a
column made up of concrete which is residing in the second floor of a building that will be
used for residential purposes, i.e. the information in a BIM is meaningful. Similarly, one
can get meaningful information about doors, windows, heating, ventilation and air
conditioning elements and so on by using BIMs in the building information
infrastructures. Although the information in BIMs is meaningful, it in fact becomes
stateless after the construction of the building has been completed. In other words, a BIM
user can find out whether a door in a building is constructed of timber, if the door has
been constructed (or not) on a given date. The new buzzword wireless sensor network
(WSN) refers to a web of distributed autonomous sensors that are continually
monitoring physical and environmental conditions. A WSN is made up of individual
nodes (i.e. motes), each capable of collecting information and communicating with other
motes. Sensor networks are typically self-organising, meaning that information
collected from one mote will find its way to the network’s central computer by hopping
from mote to mote over the most efficient path. The data can be collected continuously,
unobtrusively and in harsh conditions for a long period of time (Abernathy, 2011).
In the context of BIM-M, the distributed sensors and WSNs can monitor conditions
such as temperature, gas levels, pollutants, humidity, state of doors and windows
 CI (i.e. being open/closed and so on), occupancies in rooms and conditions of different
11,3 systems working within a building/facility. Sensors in the WSNs (when embedded into
tiny microcontroller cards) are now capable of publishing atomic web feeds regarding
the condition they monitor (without requiring any other hardware resources).
Furthermore, the information provided by the sensors when integrated with the
building information infrastructures becomes very valuable in transforming
256 meaningful building information into meaningful and full state information which is
more accurate and up-to-date.
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Stateless web services

SOAs and stateless web services offers opportunities for making building information
full state (i.e. real time, accurate and up-to-date). In addition, SOAs can also serve for
derivability of information, as information can be exposed as a part of service contracts
within applications. SOAs consist of web services that can be defined as data or
application interfaces which users can reach by using agreed contracts and standard
messages. Two definitive characteristics of web services are loose coupling and network
transparency (Pulier and Taylor, 2006). Web services are loosely coupled, i.e. when a
piece of software has been exposed as a web service it is simple to move it to another
computer as the service functions are independent of the client application that is using
the service. On the other hand, as web services’ consumers and providers send messages
to each other using open internet protocols, web services offer total network
transparency (i.e. the location of the web service will not have an impact on its function).
Stateless web services (i.e. representational state transfer) are built upon resources
(i.e. anything that is available digitally over the web), their names (identified by uniform
indicators, i.e. URIs) representations (i.e. metadata/data on the current state of the
resource) and links between the representations. In stateless web services, each client
request is treated as an independent transaction, and the service does not store
information regarding the client that makes the request. By eliminating the need for
storing the state of clients, the performance of the servers increases, while stateless
transactions allow the exposition of web services with minimum hardware requirements
(i.e. by microcontroller cards containing sensors). Vast amounts of data coming from
BIMs, and micro (atomic) feeds from WSNs can together be exposed as stateless web
services, and generating data mash-ups from these resources would be very
straightforward. In summary, stateless web services offers opportunities to integrate
distributed building information (in the cloud), and provide an environment where
a mass of new information can be derived.

Semantic web
If this mass of new information (derived from multiple resources) can be restructured in
compliance with semantic web standards and supported by well-built ontologies,
i.e. formal specifications of conceptualisations, which consist of finite list of terms and
the relationships between these terms (Antoniou and van Harmelen, 2008), semantic
queries such as “Would you provide me the number of working elevators and escalators
in the Empire State Building between 12.00-14.00?”, or “Would you provide me the
average CO2 level in top 20 floors of five of the highest buildings in London?” or “Please
provide me the difference between temperatures in my hotel room in Singapore Marina
Bay, and my office in Sydney.” can be answered. Although today the pioneering
 semantic search engine WolframAlpha (WolframAlpha, 2011) is capable of calculating Emerging
the required ventilation flow rate for a residential building based on the semantic query technologies
“Provide indoor air quality for a 3 bedroom house of 200 m2” as 23.77 litres per second,
real-time information provided by sensor networks needs to be integrated with BIMs for for BIM 2.0
supporting the queries presented (i.e. regarding the buildings in New York, London,
Singapore and Sydney). The success rate in responses to the (presented) semantic
queries will therefore depend on: 257
.
the level of integration of distributed building information;
.
the level success in derivation of information mass from multiple loosely coupled
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resources (which are exposed as web services); and finally

. how well the query can be interpreted and, reasoning/search and retrieval can be
accomplished upon the interpreted query.

Information structured in compliance with Resource Description Framework metadata

framework (i.e. in form of N-triples) will help in retrieving more meaningful answers to
the semantic queries.
In summary therefore, the focus of BIM-M is now becoming broader as the
information management paradigm shifts from enabling (i) model-based management
of (ii) shared building information, which provides (iii) meaningful data about a building
in a (iv) standardised way (i.e. BIM 1.0), to enable an (i) integrated environment of (ii)
distributed information which is always (iii) up-to-date and open for (iv) derivation of
new information (i.e. BIM 2.0). Technologies such as cloud computing, sensor networks,
stateless web services and semantic web, may be the new facilitators of this paradigm
shift. For the construction industry, there is still a long way to go and much to do in terms
of realising the full potential of these emerging technologies in line with the efficiencies
and performance improvement that are being witnessed in other sectors. However, as
both the technologies and industry matures, progressive improvements towards BIM
2.0 offer several benefits for subsequent exploitation.

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Isikdag, U. (Eds), Handbook of Research on Building Information Modelling and
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Turner, M.J. (2010), Worldwide Cloud Systems Management Software 2010-2015 Forecast and
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Further reading
Alshawi, M., Khosrowshahi, F., Goulding, J., Lou, E. and Underwood, J. (2008), Strategic
Positioning of IT in Construction: An Industry Leaders’ Perspective, Construct IT For
Business Report, Construct IT For Business, Salford.

Corresponding author
Umit Isikdag can be contacted at: uisikdag@gmail.com

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