The Key to Landing Smart City Contracts Lies With BIM
According to recent research, smart cities are expected to swell into a multi-trillion-dollar market within the next several years, primarily driven by governments investing in technology to keep up with urbanization and its related challenges, such as the need for improved energy infrastructure and more effective ways of dealing with vehicles.
The research also found that a major area of growth will continue to come from the smart building segment, which is the building block for all smart city development. As such in order for the construction industry to keep pace with smart city development and the required level of collaboration necessary to connect all the building elements from the planning phase to completion, is only possible with advanced tools that provide the insight to more efficiently plan, design, construct and manage buildings and infrastructure. Without advanced tools and technologies to support the smart building segment of growth, the efforts to create a smart city become exponentially more complex and the potential for loss of information inevitable.
Cities and their construction partners that lack an effective means to collaborate and share information over the life of the project will struggle to remain competitive and sustain projects and will indelibly require far greater budgets from what is usually a very small public coffer.
It’s clear that one critical element of the smart city development process begins with building information management adoption. BIM is transforming the construction industry—changing the way multidisciplinary project teams collaborate at every stage to deliver significant efficiency and cost savings.
The construction industry and project collaborators, including specifiers, builders, developers and engineers, must be equipped and ready to manage not only the influx of “smart” requests, but also collaboration and communication silos these projects often face.
High-quality project information from BIM data allows project stakeholders from every phase to communicate and coordinate from the start. Asset data, both current and historical, is available in the cloud for review and use by all project players at all times. Potential clashes among contributors are foreseen and revealed before any site work has begun.
