Learn BIM to Mitigate risk in construction projects
The construction risk at the design stage may occur when the completed building does not meet the needs of the owners and occupants. Changing needs of the owner over time or poor communication between design staff and the owner creates this. However, Building Information Modeling (BIM) refers to the creation and coordinated use of a collection of digital information about a building project. The information can include cost, schedule, fabrication, maintenance, energy, and 3D models which are used for design decision-making, production of high quality construction documents, predicting performance, cost estimating, and construction planning, and eventually, for managing and operating the facility based on these functionalities of BIM, it can therefore be used in mitigating construction risk in the following ways:
Elimination of manual extraction of drawing through data exchange platform or other method of integrating process.
BIM applications utilize parametric modeling. Parametric modeling involved the use of relational database containing information regarding the elements of a structure and their relationships. The capture and management of objects relationships is useful in enabling a high level of model analysis beyond object properties . Therefore, the model can be used to generate space calculations, energy efficiency, structural analysis details and traditional design document Thus, the risk of wrong measurement or inaccurate generation of cost will be minimized.
Reducing the design deficiency through data exchange platform:
The main benefit of BIM is its ability to decrease errors made by design and construction teams by employing the mechanism of conflict detection through visualization techniques, referring to relevant parts in relations to the whole building model . As BIM becomes more capable of handling more building information, this can help to save cost through reduction of risk in time and errors.
Integrating design process with construction and engineering:
This can be achieved when a builder simulates a building before and during the actual construction process. 4D or 5D models which integrates time and cost in addition to the 3D geometry models. In this way, changes cannot only be controlled in the design and engineering stages, but also can be controlled to some extent in the built environment lifecycle . It is ideally suited on projects with high cost and high risk and which can lead to high rewards for mitigating those cost and risk. BIM with schedule and cost which when it is made accessible to all stake holders will foster communication and cooperation thereby ameliorating the risk of defragmentation among project actors.
Mitigating risk in construction projects has been considered as an important attempt in order to achieve project’s objective in terms of time, cost, quality, safety and sustainability. Risk has been identified as a combination of the probability of occurrence of a defined hazard and the magnitude of the consequences of the occurrence. Risk in construction may be influenced by either internal factors or external factors. While internal factors are project oriented and can be controlled by the project team, external factors cannot be controlled by the project team. BIM has been identified as sophisticate platform that will help in reducing risk in construction project, particularly in elimination of the common errors in the design management.