Towards Managing Iterative Changes in BIM Collaboration Workflows

Collaboration on Building Information Models (BIMs) requires iterative and distributed processes that make maximum reuse of the information being exchanged directly between models in a platform independent model collaboration environment. As the information in a BIM grows during an iterative design and production process and even beyond into maintenance, a critical issue is how to manage the iterative changes because of the collaboration operations and workflows that involve various project participants and heterogeneous applications. This paper highlights the overall problem of managing iterative changes in BIMs and discusses various issues and challenges involved in controlling the collaboration transactions on a BIM data repository in a multi-model collaboration environment. This positional paper describes that model matching and comparison strategies are the keys to solve the problem of iterative change management, which may have better solutions in other knowledge domain such as software engineering. The future research is exploring Software Source Control (SSC) strategies to devise a signature-based model comparison approach for IFC models that can lead to potential solutions for effective management of collaboration operations with BIMs.

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