Building Information Modeling (BIM) for existing buildings - literature review and future needs

While BIM processes are established for new buildings, the majority of existing buildings is not maintained, refurbished or deconstructed with BIM yet. Promising benefits of efficient resource management motivate research to overcome uncertainties of building condition and deficient documentation prevalent in existing buildings. Due to rapid developments in BIM research, involved stakeholders demand a state-of-the-art overview of BIM implementation and research in existing buildings. This paper presents a review of over 180 recent publications on the topic. Results show scarce BIM implementation in existing buildings yet, due to challenges of (1) high modeling/conversion effort from captured building data into semantic BIM objects, (2) updating of information in BIM and (3) handling of uncertain data, objects and relations in BIM occurring in existing buildings. Despite fast developments and spreading standards, challenging research opportunities arise from process automation and BIM adaption to existing buildings' requirements. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.