Reshaping Construction Management for Sustainability and Resource Efficiency. Implementation of LeanBIM Concept in Construction

Master's Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Engineering - Civil Engineering, , course: Construction managment, language: English, abstract: Construction is considered to be a high waste generating industry, in spite of its importance for human lives and economies. A lot of researches have been conducted to find out new ways to improve the way construction projects are managed. The main goals of these researches were to reduce the cost and time for projects as well as increase the quality of the final product. In 1990's Lean Construction concept has been founded as an alternative for the conventional construction project management methodologies, based on Lean manufacturing concepts focusing on value and reducing waste in the construction processes. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a modern tool enabling intelligent model based process. BIM implementation has a lot of benefits to the construction, for instance, making use of visualization of the final product to facilitate communication between different disciplines and team members, enable what-if analysis and analyze the constructability of a building. During the last decade, Pioneering contractors in US have realized the synergic fit between Lean and BIM. The interaction between Lean Construction and BIM has been the topic of many researches since then. This research introduces the term 'LeanBIM', which refers to the combination of the tools of Lean and BIM, and discuss their effects on sustainability and resource efficiency. An extensive review of literature is carried out and a survey is conducted on the Lean and BIM professionals and researchers from all over the world. The results showed the positive effect of LeanBIM implementation on sustainability of building as well as resource efficiency. LeanBIM is also expected to reduce the overall cost and time required for construction, and increase the quality. The results also showed that there is shortage in Lean/BIM professionals, lack of legal framework to enable the collaboration between all parties, lack of awareness of LeanBIM benefits. It is observed from the result that a considerable investment is required to form an IT infrastructure capable of implementing LeanBIM. Keywords: Lean Construction, Building Information Modeling, Sustainability, LeanBIM, Resource efficiency, Construction Project Management.