Examination of the Levels of Development of Building Information Models in the Nigerian Construction Industry

Abstract

BIM can be used to illustrate the entire building lifecycle, from cradle to inception, design and demolition and materials reuse; quantities and properties of materials, which can be easily extracted from the model; and the scope of works, including management of project targets and facilities management throughout the building’s life. The implementation of BIM in projects or organization is in phases and building information models can be developed as 2D, 3D, 4D, 5D and 6D BIM depending on the stage of BIM implementation and level of details required. This study examined the levels of details of building information models being generated by two hundred and eighty two construction professionals in Lagos State, Nigeria using respondents driven sampling technique. Frequency distribution and percentage, clustered bar chart, mean ranking, Kruskal Wallis test and Fisher exact test were used to analyse the data obtained from the respondents. The study found that the implementation of BIM in the study area is for visualization purpose. The findings also revealed that the levels of generating 2D and 3D BIM were very high in the study area; and that 3D architectural model, 3D architectural and structural model, and 3D architectural and building services model were the most developed variants of 3D BIM. It was concluded that that the status of BIM adoption in construction industry in Lagos State, Nigeria is at the visualization phase.
Keywords: BIM details, BIM, BIM development, 4D BIM, federated BIM.