Week 4 - BIM Makes the Engineer's Work Easier

BIM will continue to make engineers' work easier and easier as time passes. BIM and parametric modeling take out many of the tedious, error-prone parts of an engineer's work. Parametric modeling updates objects and geometry instantly with minimal inputs from an engineer, and can save hours of work with each small iteration. This allows designers to be more creative and experimental, as they can model small changes quickly. As is described in the linked MIT technology review, designers can now optimize buildings without having to run through menial drafting work and endless calculations. This makes the engineer's workload smaller, leads to fewer errors, and improves buildings. In the same article it is described how parametric modeling aids in designing for energy efficiency by allowing designers to slightly modify window placements and materials and quickly analyze the effects on lighting and thermal efficiency. Without BIM, an engineer would have had to manually redraw each situation and recalculate the loads, a process that could potentially have taken hours. Using parametric modeling, a few variables could be changed and the building would automatically update and produce the new calculations. BIM can also aid in the design of larger scale urban planning projects. While not currently available, it is projected that future technologies could aid in modeling entire neighborhoods and optimizing proportions and shapes. In conjunction with 3D modeling technologies and geographic information systems, engineers could model a site and it's proposed buildings. This would allow engineers to easily visualize the site and its skyline and iterate the buildings quickly so as to see how the buildings interact together. These models could also include roads and other civil engineering concerns, as described in the CE news article. Building comprehensive, parametric models could make an engineer's work much easier because changes are inevitable, and creating various iterations of a building or site quickly becomes time consuming depending upon the scale of the project. BIM allows engineers to try new things and spend their time productively in changing designs and optimizing, rather than in drafting or running tedious calculations.

The counter argument to the points I made above would be that the initial modeling using BIM consumes more time than BIM saves in future iterations. This argument may be true at the moment, because many current engineers are still uncomfortable with BIM design methods. However, new engineers are being trained using Revit and other programs, and many are quite comfortable with them. While it is true that modeling something in Revit often takes longer than modeling the same thing in AutoCAD (in my experience on co-op), this gap will be reduced as drafters become accustomed to the various BIM programs. I believe that over time, BIM will make the engineer's work easier, more time efficient, and save money.

Comments:

In Audrey's post (http://ae-510-ay13-14.blogspot.com/2014/01/bim-will-improve-buildings-vs-it-will.html) she touched on what I saw in the articles that I read but didn't talk about in detail. BIM is especially useful in green design, and clearly can improve buildings in the design phase and beyond. Modeling the building as a whole often allows the program to model how efficiently various systems work, allowing them to be optimized.

Esther's post (http://ae-510-ay13-14.blogspot.com/2014/01/group-bim-vs-drafting-advantages-and.html) used one of the same sources that I did, and she showed very well why BIM makes an engineer's work easier. The graph that she included shows how BIM saves money versus design with CAD, and allows engineers to make a larger impact early in the process. She sums up extremely well the advantages and disadvantages to using BIM, and I think that her blog shows that BIM is superior to CAD drafting.

Sources:

Arieff, Allison. "New Forms That Function Better." MIT Technology Review. MIT, 31 July 2013. Web. 27 Jan. 2014. <http://www.technologyreview.com/review/517596/new-forms-that-function-better/>.

Scally, Bernard J. "GeoDesign Forum Shows Future of Planning - Roxborough Review - Montgomery News." Montgomery Media. Montgomery Media, 7 Oct. 2013. Web. 28 Jan. 2014. <http://www.montgomerynews.com/articles/2013/10/07/roxborough_review/news/doc5252d98f0ac5b060829910.txt?viewmode=fullstory>.

Strafaci, Adam. "What Does BIM Mean for Civil Engineers." CE News. CE News, Oct. 2008. Web. 28 Jan. 2014. <http://www.cenews.com/magazine-article----what_does_bim_mean_for_civil_engineers_-6098.html>.