A conceptual approach to track design changes within a multi-disciplinary building information modeling environment

Successful management of design changes is critical for the efficient delivery of construction projects. Building information modeling (BIM) is envisioned to play an important role in integrating design, construction and facility management processes through coordinated changes throughout the project life-cycle. BIM currently provides significant benefits in coordinating changes across different views in a single model, and identifying conflicts between different discipline-specific models. However, current BIM tools provide limited support in managing changes across several discipline-specific models. This paper describes an approach to represent, coordinate, and track changes within a collaborative multi-disciplinary BIM environment. This approach was informed by a detailed case study of a large, complex, fast-tracked BIM project where we investigated numerous design changes, analyzed change management processes, and evaluated existing BIM tools. Our approach characterizes design changes in an ontology to represent changed component attributes, dependencies between components, and change impacts. It explores different types of dependencies amongst different design changes and describes how a graph-based approach and dependency matrix could assist with automating the propagation and impact of changes in a BIM-based project delivery process.