Until a few years ago, talking about BIM or H-BIM was a subject dealt with by the few brave pioneers specializing in designing on an international scale; today the BIM approach has become a “must” of planning, rehabilitation, re-functionalization, restoration, recovery, etc.
The use of BIM techniques has had such an increase, sensitizing researchers to experiment with new and more effective applications. The solicitations that constantly come from the professional world, have opened a very wide window in the CH field; both with regard to its problems and ways of overcoming them.
And although the field of cultural heritage is the confluence of the largest number of trials, the engineering fields have also turned their attention to BIM applications. This includes road engineering, hydraulic engineering, railway engineering, structural and energy engineering; in short, to all the sectors involved in a Smart City, which today more than ever, needs a Smart BIM methodology.
The ability to query a three-dimensional model to extrapolate all the information needed for new interventions on a work, optimizes timing and results of the operations to be performed. The BIM paths become increasingly rich and articulated and open to meet the needs of all those practitioners that are involved in a structure built or to be built, in a good state of conservation or to restructure, restore, recover, etc.
Think of the electrical and hydraulic systems, the structural system, the furnishings, the closing elements, the materials used, etc. Obviously, the more complex the information structure to be set out, the more complex the algorithm that supports this scaffolding becomes.
An extremely vast subject and, for that reason, it lends itself to misunderstandings that are not always easy to identify. In addition to frequent misunderstandings, difficulties are encountered in trying to integrate data related to models made with different software. It appears, therefore, that interoperability is a problem in practice much more complex than claimed at the theoretical level.
In this issue of the Dn journal, there are 8 articles that allow the reader to learn both the state of the advances in literature, the operations of new mathematical algorithms and the computational designs that, thanks to the experiments conducted, allow more and more new applications. BIM techniques are often adopted to solve the difficulties related to the management of production / construction / intervention / construction / sustainability costs.
In this issue there are some works that deal with BIM under other aspects in very different contexts; with characteristics and needs sometimes in contrast and this allows us to be able to understand some essential aspects that become a paradigm, an archetype of operating methodologies.
Furthermore, the BIM experimentation in the GIS field is very timely so as to obtain the territorial data for the development of City Information Modelling (CIM) using open source data and geospatial surveys.
A need that has arisen spontaneously as the BIM system has entered into the design and redevelopment of the building, is that of the need to codify a new parameter, the Level of Reliability, which takes into account both the geometric and semantic-ontological reliability of the model with respect to the reality it intends to describe. Hence the need to code a set of shared and repeatable parameters to arrive at a numerical evaluation of LOR synthesis, which is understood as the level of global coherence of the process of defining a digital object.
One of the goals that BIM scholars and experimenters intend to achieve is that of remote application directly in-situ. In this way, you have the ability to update in real time, make any changes, annotate considerations, identify points of fragility or strength, etc. and see the system’s response on the server. Moreover, through the application of the computational design it is possible to speed up and improve the realization of complex geometries typical of historical architecture and to automate some processes during the design phase.
Exploring the new frontiers of BIM through the use of algorithmic tools for the control of the formal and informative aspects of the project represents, today, a real revolution in terms of the optimization of the tangled and sometimes indestructible machine for the design of building structures and civil infrastructures.
Laura Inzerillo, Francesco Ruperto