Advancing in Building Information Modeling (BIM) Contracting: Trends in the AEC/FM Industry

摘要

BIM, as a best practice in the AEC/FM industry, provides a new set of processes and technologies in construction projects to improve productivity and reduce waste. Despite the significant growth in BIM adoption and research on technological aspects of BIM, far too little attention has been paid to research on BIM contracting. So far, two industry leading organizations (AIA and AGC) have developed standard forms of agreement for BIM contracting. However, many projects have used custom manuscripts to satisfy their special contractual needs, and the existing literature has not dealt with these industry-wide trends of BEVI contracting. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine custom developed contracts in order to trace advances in BIM contracting. Through a detailed analysis of custom manuscripts, this research demonstrates that there are several areas of contracting that standard forms have not addressed. These include but are not limited to (1) requirements for BIM process inputs (e.g. BIM staff competencies), (2) requirements for BIM process management (e.g. BEVI quality assurance and quality control, a metric based BIM processing assessment), (3) requirements for information modeling (e.g. landscape, facility management), and (4) requirements for data security (e.g. corruption of files, and data misuse). This study has practical implications for BIM implementation and future developments of inclusive BIM standard agreements.