LOC Talks

BIM for Europe 

The economic benefits of digitalization are well recognized. The wider use of technology, digital processes, automation and higher-skilled workers contribute greatly to Europe’s economic, social and environmental future. The European construction sector is undergoing its own digital revolution: Building Information Modelling (BIM) represents the construction sector’s moment of digitalization. Since February 2016 Europe is host to the greatest regional concentration of government-led BIM programmes in the world. The "EU BIM Task Group", formed in 2016 and co-funded by the European Commission, has over 20 European member states with representatives of public procurers, public building and infrastructure owners and policy makers. It aims to bring together these national efforts into a common and aligned European approach to develop a world-class digital construction sector. 

The 3D Modeling of Interiors featuring Combinatorics and Stochastics

Three-dimensional urban and building models in the sense of CityGML capture the geometry, represent the structure and semantically model relevant components such as doors, windows and balconies.

Building Information Models are models for supporting building planning, construction and facility management. They also represent those objects that are not observable from the outside.

The three-dimensional modeling of interior spaces forms a "missing link" between both worlds. Their geometrical detection is complex and difficult. Laser scanners or image-based processes require that every single room must be entered. In addition, the way from the 3D point cloud to the interior model is methodically sophisticated and requires that furniture is identified and "calculated". We present an approach that requires no additional geometry acquisition inside buildings.

Beyond BIM

The “digital transformation” has become a widely discussed topic – even in the construction sector, where digital methods play an increasingly important role in planning and in the construction work itself. However, the direct connection between “Building Information Modeling” (BIM) and computer-controlled construction work is still a construction site itself. There are still too many fault locations in the digital process.

The German-Swiss office Design-To-Production has been designing digital process chains from design to production for ten years now – successfully. The interdisciplinary team around the architect Arnold Walz and the computer scientist Fabian Scheurer helps architects, engineers, and construction companies to bridge the gap between the idea and its realization, consequently relying on digital modeling and computer-controlled production processes. Once, technologies like this were mainly needed for geometrically complex building projects such as the Centre Pompidou in Metz (Shigeru Ban) or the Mercedes Benz Museum (UN Studio), but they are now also of interest for standard construction projects. For an efficient implementation, however, there have to be new processes in the field of planning and construction: Beyond BIM.

Adopting BIM and Lean in the Construction Industry

Assoc. Prof. Sacks studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He has many years of industrial experience in structural engineering design and in software development for the construction industry. He is currently Associate Professor of Construction Management at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. To date, he is the author or co-author of two books, 37 papers in international peer-reviewed academic journals, 42 peer-reviewed conference papers, and a number of research reports. He is a co-author of the leading text on Building Information Modeling, entitled “The BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Architects, Engineers, Contractors and Fabricators”.

Experiences from the BIM-Adoption in Finland and UK– Clients as the drivers of innovation

Dr. Arto Kiviniemi, Professor of Digital Architectural Design, is one of the internationally leading experts in the integrated Building Information Modelling (BIM) which he has developed both in Finland and internationally since 1996. In 1997-2002 Arto lead the Finnish national R&D programme which created the foundation for Finland’s position as one of the leading countries adopting BIM. In May 2010 he moved to UK, first to the University of Salford, where he initiated the first MSc BIM programme in the UK, and in September 2013 he started in his current position at the University of Liverpool.