Involving knowledge of construction and facilities management in design through the BIM approach

The construction industry has increasingly realised the importance of knowledge. Accordingly, various strategies and tools have been applied over the years to support knowledge management (KM). In particular, building information modelling (BIM) is a technology that has recently emerged in the construction industry. BIM is an object-oriented and parametric-based tool with the features of digital visualisation, life cycle simulation, coordination and collaborative environment. Consequently, many studies have been conducted to explore these four aspects. However, existing studies on BIM-based management mainly focus on the information level. By contrast, only a few studies have explored KM under the BIM environment. Therefore, this study explores the potential and expectations of BIM-based KM for the early application of knowledge of construction and facilities management (FM) into the design stage. A total of 30 semi-structured interviews are conducted to collect qualitative information from the AEC industry. The existing KM practice is explored based on the analysis of the collected qualitative information. Thereafter, a discussion is presented on how the BIM-based KM can be used to mitigate the current KM challenges. Lastly, this study presents the expectations on BIM-based KM for involving the knowledge of construction and FM into the design phase. Overall, this study provides new insights into the transformation of research focus from BIM-based information management to BIM-based KM.