Between the Poles: UK BIM adoption survey reveals facilities/asset management trails other disciplines

Geoff Zeiss

About the Author

October 2024

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Links

Lidar News
Gene Roe's laser scanning industry news
Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGEO
OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use
Proven guidelines for reducing underground infrastructure damage at airports, university, industrial, and commercial campuses, and towns
There are proven measures that an administration, owner, or municipal government responsible for an airport, university, industrial or commercial campus, or town can undertake to reduce the risk of underground utility damage, the associated disruptions to operations and business and the danger for workers and the public.
Sharing information about the location of underground utilities
The U.S. devotes an estimated $10 billion annually to locating underground infrastructure. Every construction project requiring excavation involves significant efforts in locating underground utilities prior to and during construction to reduce the risk of injuries and unexpected project delays. But this information is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again. There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database.
Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
Progress in geospatial, civil, and BIM interoperability promises efficient workflows for infrastructure
The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector. After the announcement about a year ago by Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost of a new relationship to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies, I thought it a good time to review progress toward interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds.
Geography2050: Accurate location information about underground infrastructure is essential for powering our future planet
I thought it would be worth while to include here a talk I gave at GEOGRAPHY 2050 Powering Our Future Planet at Columbia University in New York about the importance of accurate location information about underground infrastructure for the future development of the energy grid. With some notable exceptions accurately recording the location of subsurface infrastructure including oil, gas, electric power and other energy infrastructure is ignored - perhaps this is a case of out-of-sight is indeed out-of-mind. The reality is that knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the explosions in San Bruno in California (2010) and Belgium (2004) immediately come to mind.
Deep learning enables automated extraction of building footprints and road networks from satellite imagery
Automated feature extraction from satellite imagery has made major progress in the last year. Accurate building footprints extracted from high resolution satellite imagery are becoming available from companies such as Ecopia, which has just announced a partnership with DigitalGlobe, whose satellites are capable of 30 cm (approximately one foot) resolution. Also NVIDIA has demonstrated the ability to automate detection of many road networks using sophisticated algorithms and multi-spectral high resolution imagery.
BIM + geospatial interoperability would avoid another CAD + GIS quagmire
A specific challenge currently facing the AEC and geospatial industries is integrating building information models (BIM) and geospatial infrastructure and building models. There are parallels between what happened in the 1990s in unsuccessfully addressing CAD+GIS interoperability and the current challenge of BIM+geospatial interoperability. But there are also important differences which provide grounds for optimism that the availability of both BIM and geospatial standards, a vibrant open source geospatial community, and a new willingness on the part of major software players in the BIM and geospatial industries will make it possible to successfully address the latest interoperability challenge facing the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial industries.
BVLOS drones improve power line inspections amid increasing fire and storm risks for utilities | Utility Dive
Transmission line inspections for vegetation management and other purposes are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. We saw the devastating effect of vegetation encroachment in the recent California fires, which in part have been blamed on failure to maintain properly cleared transmission lines. With drones that can cover great distances in a single flight and provide detailed and accurate aerial imagery of transmission lines and other infrastructure, it is now possible to almost completely automate this expensive process. Automating transmission line inspections for vegetation management using BVLOS drones not only saves money, but also could improve the resiliency and reliability of the transmission grid.

« Accelerating capital investment in new technology for mapping underground infrastructure | Main | UK's bottom-up/top-down approach to creating a voluntary National Underground Asset Registry »

July 05, 2021

UK BIM adoption survey reveals facilities/asset management trails other disciplines

The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital model will be during operations and maintenance, which typically represents 80% of the cost of a facility. But to date there has been limited uptake of a full lifecycle approach focusing on cost reduction during operations and maintenance. Since 2018 there has been begun to be quantitative evidence of the benefits of a full lifecycle integrated BIM+geospatial approach to construction.

The UK BIM Alliance has just released its State of the Nation Survey 2021 to measure the adoption of information management using BIM across the UK built environment. The survey involved 1,170 total respondents with broad cross sector coverage of 25 organizational roles and functions in construction.

Architecture (165 respondents), general contracting(143) and clients/asset owners (115) were the top three best represented organizational roles of respondents. Of particular note is that nearly 10% of the respondents were clients/asset owners, which have been typically underrepresented in previous BIM surveys.

Main conclusion

The main conclusion about the adoption of BIM in the UK, which has been mandated for public projects since 2016, is that 65% of respondents report that that they have used BIM on projects. Of these organizations most of them have used BIM on at least half their projects. 60% state that they used BIM on over half of their projects. This equates to 740+ companies that have adopted BIM for at least half of their projects. It is not clear from the survey whether firms that are working primarily in the private sector are adopting BIM to the same extent as firms working primarily in the public sector where BIM is mandatory.

Awareness and adoption of BIM among disciplines reveals a considerable range. Not unexpectedly the disciplines/functions with the highest BIM adoption rates are architecture (75%), general contracting(76%), and various engineering disciplines (77-89%).

Facilities/asset management is still lagging in BIM adoption

Facilities/asset management (23 respondents) is less well represented in the survey and the BIM awareness and adoption rate for facilities/asset management (43 %) was among the lowest which suggests that the adoption of BIM by the facilities/asset management industry is still very low. A survey a few years ago of the Facilities Management (FM) industry found that while 92% had heard about BIM and 84% agreed that BIM has the potential to deliver value add to FM, over two thirds said that the FM is not prepared for BIM. The survey suggests that facilities/asset management is still lagging the rest of the industry in adopting BIM and this is inhibiting the broader adoption of a full lifecycle approach to construction.

Posted at 08:30 AM in Asset management, BIM+geospatial for full lifecycle project management, Construction, Facilities and operations management | Permalink

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.

Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

October 2024

Links

July 05, 2021

UK BIM adoption survey reveals facilities/asset management trails other disciplines

Main conclusion

Facilities/asset management is still lagging in BIM adoption

Comments

RSS Feed

Search

Categories

Recent Posts

Archives