Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been widely adopted in the building industry. However, the application of BIM in civil infrastructure facilities, sometimes referred to Civil Information Modeling (CIM), is relatively lacking and slow. Researchers and practitioners are increasingly putting efforts into CIM study and implementation, but so far there is no comprehensive review of their efforts in this regard. Such study can help the academia and industry find the gaps and identify future research direction. Therefore, this work firstly presents a framework to evaluate the current practices of CIM adoption for various civil infrastructure facilities. In this study, civil infrastructure facilities were divided into nine categories for evaluation and the efforts with regard to...[ Read more ]

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been widely adopted in the building industry. However, the application of BIM in civil infrastructure facilities, sometimes referred to Civil Information Modeling (CIM), is relatively lacking and slow. Researchers and practitioners are increasingly putting efforts into CIM study and implementation, but so far there is no comprehensive review of their efforts in this regard. Such study can help the academia and industry find the gaps and identify future research direction. Therefore, this work firstly presents a framework to evaluate the current practices of CIM adoption for various civil infrastructure facilities. In this study, civil infrastructure facilities were divided into nine categories for evaluation and the efforts with regard to CIM adoption for each infrastructure category were evaluated in six aspects. This study summarizes the results of 171 case studies and 62 academic papers on CIM. Based on the evaluation and comparison results, research gaps and future direction are identified. For example, CIM uses for detailed design and documentation phase and O&M phase like 5D cost estimation, are seldom conducted and studied.

5D BIM has been studied in academic research and implemented in industry. However, existing studies on 5D BIM focus on cash outflow estimation rather than cash inflow analysis and project financing. This thesis proposes a 5D BIM-based framework for cash flow analysis and project financing. This framework considers contract types and retainage to estimate cash inflow, and cash outflow patterns for equipment, manpower and materials to accurately estimate cash outflow. Project financing scenarios can also be evaluated using the framework. One building case and one bridge case are demonstrated to validate the proposed framework by considering various what-if scenarios. The framework can help contractors analyze the cash flow and make appropriate decisions for different design and payment scheme alternatives in various types of construction projects.