Developing an MCDM model for the benefits, opportunities, costs and risks of BIM adoption

Abstract

Building information modeling (BIM) offers various deterministic and uncertain benefits and costs. Although there are similarities between such costs and benefits in developed and developing countries, these factors should be analyzed carefully for each region/country due to differences in economic and technical status as well as available policies and regulations. Numerous studies have demonstrated the benefits and shortcomings of BIM adoption around the globe; however, there is scarce comprehensive research focusing on Iran with unique financial circumstances. The aim of this research is to investigate the benefits, opportunities, costs and risks (BOCRs) offered by BIM implementation in Iran as a developing country with high potential in but less adoption of BIM in construction projects. After identifying the BOCRs of BIM adoption from the literature, the Interval-Valued Fuzzy Delphi Method was used to identify the BOCRs while a novel multi-criteria decision-making approach (i.e., fuzzy parsimonious analytic hierarchy process) was employed to analyze BOCRs, respectively. The results showed that 4 out of 46 BOCRs gathered from the literature were not significant for Iran and should be omitted from further analysis, while one cost factor was added to the list. Also, it was revealed that “Facilitates project communication among stakeholders”, “Integrating life-cycle assessment dimensions to the decision-making process”, “Cost/efforts required to personnel training” and “Lack of national standard, procedures and guidelines” were the most significant BOCRs, respectively. These findings contributed to filling the research gap in BIM adoption in Iran using a novel methodology that provides deep insights into BIM adoption for practitioners and can be used as a basis for developing theoretical and conceptual research frameworks. The findings of this study are built upon the opinions of experts within the context of Iran and should be considered as a snapshot of the BOCRs of the adoption of BIM in Iranian construction projects while these are not futureproofed.