A BIM-Enabled Change Detection System for Assessing Impacts of Construction Change Orders

As the current practice of construction change orders relies primarily on paper-based documents, project stakeholders must endure difficulties in retrieving necessary information for analyzing their impacts. Using 2D... [ view full abstract ]

As the current practice of construction change orders relies primarily on paper-based documents, project stakeholders must endure difficulties in retrieving necessary information for analyzing their impacts. Using 2D drawings often leads to subjectivity and misinterpretation of changed building conditions. These limitations are extremely crucial because the physical conditions of the building are vital information for evaluating such consequences. Failures to detect altered physical conditions lead to inaccurate quantifications of impacts on project schedule and cost. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is an innovative concept that possesses 3D models embedded with necessary information. Not only does it allow all stakeholders to visualize a facility more readily and efficiently, but it can also provide vital information for various purposes, including change order management. BIM technology allows us to readily author and modify models to reflect any changes of a facility. Since the quantity of building elements can be automatically retrieved from BIM models, we can accelerate the quantity takeoff process. In this paper, we introduce a BIM-enabled system to assist project stakeholders in detecting the physical alterations of a facility resulting from construction changes. This is part of a BIM-based system for evaluating the impacts of construction change orders. The proposed system integrates several BIM-enabled tools, namely, Autodesk Revit, Dynamo, Microsoft Excel, and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). As the main component, Autodesk Revit, plays a major role in design authoring and serves as a visualization platform through the Basic BIM model and the Modified BIM model. Dynamo is designed to extract necessary information from both models for the subsequent analysis of change order impacts. VBA is scripted to filter and compare the element parameters of the facility prior to and after the change. Microsoft Excel presents the analytical results by highlighting the changed elements along with their parameters. The results encompass all alterations of building elements, including geometry, material, and quantity, resulting from a particular change order. The proposed system is illustrated through a case study of an actual 18-story building project. Per the owner’s desire to modify parts of the building, change order instructions are issued. The modified model is authored in a BIM platform. The physical alterations of the facility can be automatically detected by the proposed system. The results are subsequently elaborated for estimating schedule and cost impacts resulting from such change order.

Keywords:     Building Information Modeling (BIM), change order, change order impact assessment, change detection application