Automation of the Building Information Model Breakdown Structure.

Breaking down project information via different breakdown structures has been a successful way of managing and controlling construction projects with levels of efficiency and effectiveness otherwise unimaginable to achieve over the past decades. However, the current practice of grouping and organizing building information models from multiple project participants does not reflect such breakdown structures well. This gap renders it a challenge to introducing Building Information Modelling (BIM) to on-site meetings in the construction phase, such as daily subcontractor huddle and pull planning meetings, in which on-the-spot-requests to query federated models are prevalent. This paper introduces the underlying concepts of a method that allows automatic grouping of models so that the model breakdown structure (MBS) matches a certain breakdown structure within a project. An automation tool has been developed accordingly and tested in two case studies, which prove that the proposed method enables project participants without extensive trainings of BIM the rapid identification of the desired model contents.