The potential use of BIM through an electronic submission: A preliminary study

Abstract

Globally, the public sector plays an important role in leading the market towards BIM adoption as they can be a catalyst towards better utilisation of BIM in the industry. Implementation of electronic submission for instance, may become a channel for the public sector to gather information within BIM environment, especially project development information from the design stage throughout the construction phase. The aim of this paper is to investigate the potential of BIM implementation within the public sector, specifically how BIM could be utilised to facilitate electronic submission. The research method applied for this study includes a literature review, interviews and qualitative analysis of the data collected. The study is limited mainly to the current status in the public sector. Therefore, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five professionals from the public sector agencies and the data gathered has been analysed using a content analysis procedure. Finally, the results have been used to create a proposed conceptual system environment for a BIM-based electronic system. This study shows that BIM can be very useful to facilitate electronic submission concerning building approval. The outcome is also presented as a conceptual design for BIM-based electronic submission for building plan applications which could support the public sector to adopt BIM.