EXPLORING THE SYNERGIES BETWEEN BIM AND LEAN CONSTRUCTION TO DELIVER HIGHLY INTEGRATED SUSTAINABLE PROJECTS

Sustainable Construction has been acknowledged as a driver for societal transformation. However the practice of Sustainable Construction has not flourished yet as expected due to the discipline fragmentation over the entire project life cycle. Current research exhibits adversarial and noncollaborative behaviours in the different Sustainable Construction approaches adopted for delivering Sustainable projects. As a result it is claimed that an “Integrated approach” is imperative to eliminate the current limitations for delivering Sustainable projects. It is argued that Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Lean Construction have the potential to achieve Sustainable goals in a highly integrated fashion. Thus, their integration with Sustainability can be explicitly considered. BIM has comprehensively covered different Sustainability issues such as energy efficiency, optimum resource consumption, process visualization in an integrated way through collaboration with different stakeholders. On the other hand, Lean Construction is a production management philosophy that seems to suit Sustainability principles in terms of waste minimisation, resource optimisation, continuous improvement, resource enduser satisfaction, target costing and so forth. Moreover different research contended that the action of BIM, Lean and Sustainable Construction are mutually supportive and synergistic. In this regard, this study explores an integrated approach at conceptual level that links BIM and Lean Construction to uphold Sustainable principles over the entire life cycle of a project.