The Guide to Building Information Modelling

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The ADEB-VBA’s (Association of major Belgian contractors) BIM working group, in collaboration with G30 (Association of Architects), ORI (professional organisation for engineering offices and consultancy), SECO as representative for Third Party Control Offices, and the Belgian chapter of IFMA (the international facility management association), is working on the improvement of collaboration and digital document exchanges between stakeholders of the Belgian construction industry.

To do so, the work group decided to focus on the classical contract (Design-Tender-Build) and define practical guidelines related to digital exchanges within this context. The classical contract supports a segmented industry, while other types of contracts involving all the stakeholders earlier in the process allow an easier BIM implementation. However, today, the classical contract remains the most common contract in Belgium. Therefore, the BIM work group, instead of separating the classical contract and a digital-collaborative process, decided to define rules and guidelines allowing the use of BIM on a classical Design-Tender-Build process. As the classical process is the most segmented one and thus, the one with more stakeholders working with different tools at different times, specific attention must be made during the transitional phases (e.g. new stakeholders, new tools) and how the transposition of these rules could be easily developed to other contracts by shifting agreements between the different stakeholders.

This document and its annexes present a “generic protocol” as well as general rules and fact sheets allowing the stakeholders to define the collaboration rules and thus, optimise the working process. This document is intended to evolve through feedback received from its use in practice. It is focused on three main areas:

• Information about BIM, its use and the specific roles/actors that must be taken into account and incorporated.
• General requirements related to BIM collaboration, document sharing and data management will be discussed.
• A generic BIM protocol by phase, supported by a process map representing the traditional contract. This will help stakeholders to determine their project-specific BIM protocol.

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An archive version of this information article has been created if the original is no longer accessible (Archive information from January 2024)