BIM adoption across the Chinese AEC industries: An extended BIM adoption model Christiane M. Herr ⇑ , Thomas Fischer Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China article info Article history: Received 24 April 2018 Accepted 10 June 2018 Available online 11 June 2018 Keywords: BIM Chinese construction practice BIM workflow Cross-disciplinary collaboration AEC abstract Despite strong encouragement by government guidelines and promoting efforts by the software industry, BIM is adopted at relatively slow speeds in construction industries across the world. The study presented in this paper examines the challenges to BIM adoption faced specifically in the Chinese construction industry across architecture, engineering and construction. We review recent literature addressing BIM adoption in the international context and develop a critique of common approaches to describe processes of BIM adoption. Substantiated with the analysis of detailed survey data obtained from AEC professionals in the greater Shanghai area, we propose a new, extended model to describe and assess processes of BIM adoption. Utilising this model, we evaluate temporal and collaborative dimensions of BIM adoption, and present results from detailed survey data. We further discuss how current Chinese BIM adoption in prac- tice diverges from overseas BIM adoption strategies and examine how the extended BIM adoption model can provide a more accurate representation of BIM adoption processes observed in practice in and beyond the context of the Chinese AEC industries. Ó 2018 Society for Computational Design and Engineering. Publishing Services by Elsevier. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). 1. Introduction Building Information Management (BIM) is an umbrella term describing production and management processes in which con- struction procedures as well as physical and functional character- istics of buildings are represented digitally before they are committed to physical space and usage. BIM is typically employed to predict and control construction procedures and building per- formance with the aim of minimising cost in terms of energy, materials, and labour (CDBB, 2018; GCCG, 2011; Li, Xu, & Zhang, 2017). Digital modeling provides several benefits to this end, including paperless editing and versioning, the possibility to pro- vide current standard libraries of architectural elements and their attributes such as physical properties, cost and life spans, auto- mated checking of conformity with some building codes and regu- lations, as well as networking and centralised data-bases. This in turn offers opportunities for enhanced collaboration within and across companies as well as industries. BIM promises significant savings and increased efficiency across various aspects of design, construction, maintenance, and removal/reuse. This promise leads governments throughout the developed and developing world to strongly encourage the introduction and adoption of BIM technolo- gies throughout the AEC industries, with a view to enhancing building practice medium- and long-term (Mehran, 2016; Zhang, Long, Lv, & Xiang, 2016). Accordingly, regulations are stipulated that include use of BIM models for increasingly significant parts of construction contract deliverables. For larger firms, adapting to new ways of working has been easier than for smaller firms, as they are able to invest the necessary resources to acquire both new technology as well as associated skills (Kouider, Paterson & Thomson, 2007). This type of investment is however much less attractive to firms that are working on a smaller scale and has been progressing relatively slowly. For this reason, recent government- driven enforcements of BIM components in building contracts are not always perceived as beneficial. The tensions between these promoting and inhibiting forces are particularly strong in the Chinese context, where development and construction activities continue to overshadow those of other countries, while much day-to-day work is conducted at low skill and basic technology levels. Besides software industries marketing BIM tools, the Chinese government has emerged as a major force promoting BIM adoption in China recently (Zhang et al., 2016), with a guideline by the Ministry of housing and Urban-Rural Develop- ment aiming ambitiously for a national BIM adoption rate of 90% by the year 2020 (MOHURD, 2015, p. 3). This figure is left open to interpretation, with regards to, for example, the threshold beyond which a project or a building might be considered BIM-based, the entirety to which this proportional measure refers, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcde.2018.06.001 2288-4300/Ó 2018 Society for Computational Design and Engineering. Publishing Services by Elsevier. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer review under responsibility of Society for Computational Design and Engineering. ⇑ Corresponding author at: DB305, South Campus, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, 111 Ren’ai Road, Higher Education Town, Suzhou Industrial Park, 215123 Jiangsu, China. E-mail address: Christiane.Herr@xjtlu.edu.cn (C.M. Herr). Journal of Computational Design and Engineering 6 (2019) 173–178 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Computational Design and Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jcde Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jcde/article/6/2/173/5732312 by guest on 23 June 2022