Overview
Geographic Information System is referred to as “GeoDesign” which applies to a planning process that enables decision making in the context of local and regional features. It is used for visualizing and analyzing information about real-world assets as a reference in the construction industry. It aids in covering geovisualization-based decision making and geospatial modeling.
Building Information Modeling provides a digital representation of the model that virtually shows the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) disciplines for an effective plan, design, construct and manage buildings and structures. It provides spatial and significs information throughout the building lifecycle.
Digital Construction can see revolutionary in designing by integrating these two technologies. Integration of Building Information Modelling and Geographic Information System is essential for the smart, sustainable city due to its capabilities of data integration, quantitative analysis, application of technologies and urban management. This is a new trend for the construction industry and is a rapidly growing concept too.
Both technologies, when combined, work stronger for building and city modelling. It can be applied to visualization of construction supply chain management, emergency response, urban energy, and ecological assessment, heritage protection and climate adaption.
GIS is useful for planning and operating infrastructures like roads, bridges, airports and rail networks. BIM is a key element for designing and constructions and helps you to blend a layer of geospatial context whisked into the BIM Model.
Barriers to BIM-GIS integration
BIM cannot directly share data with other users because of different applications used by them. Users need to rebuild the model and cannot properly schedule them due to poor information sharing.
BIM cannot manage what-if scenarios in one environment as it works in a single model. It also does not provide topology function that is used to link each data in a model to build a connection between them. While these two technologies get data integrated there are chances of data mismatches, and this happens due to different data types and file formats.
BIM doesn’t support semantic information and data might get lost while exporting data from it.
Benefits of Integrating GIS & BIM
Data redundancy is eliminated when these two technologies come together and information move between them. It helps in leveraging the benefit of better design and saves money. If GIS and BIM information is stored in a cloud, anyone can manage the data in any environment and from anywhere.
It is a myth that says in the construction industry BIM + GIS Data = Better Design and Long-term Savings. It can be used to bring a spatial-dimension into new construction process can bring efficiency in every project built. Integration is as much use for a structure once built. Connecting these two technologies have brought improvise operability and eliminating errors.
GIS enlarges the benefit of BIM through geovisualization and once integrated with time information allows everyone to understand better the impacts of decisions to be made pre-construction, during construction and post –construction of a project.
It facilitates BIM Coordination between different disciplines to improve documentation of design intended and unlock the diverse data sets to enable applications including sustainability analysis, operational and management uses.
Conclusion
By bringing the concepts of georeferencing & geodesign in BIM, the construction industry is going to get the benefit of future designs. Integration of BIM and GIS technologies is equally important for new construction of a building where it promotes supply chain and schedule management. For retrofit building projects, these technologies help in providing decision-making pre-construction and post-construction. Integration of GIS and BIM helps in providing spatial analysis that provides a real-world reference. It also speeds up the construction process and also depicts the decision-making process before and after construction from creating layers of geodesign. It is becoming one of the emerging trends for building design and visualization process involved in it.