BIM for existing buildings: potential opportunities and barriers

Building Information Modelling (BIM) can play a significant role for better operation and maintenance (O&M) and building facility management (FM) through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools. However, most of the existing buildings have no BIM. Research in creating BIM for existing buildings has received growing attention in recent years. It is evident from current literature that generating BIM for existing building is complex, tedious, time consuming and costly. The objective of this project is to explore potential opportunities and barriers in constructing BIM for existing buildings. Different techniques used in capturing building data such as imaging, 3D scanning, Ground Penetration Radar (GPR), 2D scanned plans and so on, have their pros and cons in terms of high modelling/conversion efforts necessary to construct a semantically rich BIM. Moreover, most of these techniques are complex; require expert knowledge; core steps are still manual; face challenges in handling occlusions/uncertain data; and BIM conversion becomes cumbersome with the BIM's increasing level of detail (LoD). A systematic analysis is done on various techniques used in data capturing and how they are converted into a semantically rich BIM, accuracy of the converted model, interoperability of the generated BIM in terms of functionality, potential barriers in the automation process and how they can be overcome.