BIMCloud: A Distributed Cloud-Based Social BIM Framework for Project Collaboration

Building information modeling (BIM) aims to facilitate information management and collaboration among stakeholders in different domains over the building life cycle. BIM models are increasingly used as an object-based information hub for storing, integrating and managing building information in different aspects. Over the building life cycle, stakeholders like the owner, designers and subcontractors keep reviewing and commenting on different building components, but these social interactions are often not recorded and managed in a structured manner. This paper presents a distributed cloud-based BIM framework that was designed to support collaboration among project participants and information sharing. The framework, namely BIMCloud, was developed based on Apache Cassandra which can be deployed on public cloud servers like Amazon EC2 or private cloud servers hosted in own infrastructures. A schematic data structure was also developed to capture the building component-based social interactions, which could be used for mining and post-processing to generate knowledge in the future. The BIMCloud framework stores BIM models based on the IFC schema and the developed schema for Social BIM. Therefore, people can make changes to the BIM models in the BIMCloud framework by transferring only a partial BIM model. An example scenario is presented in this paper.