Enabling construction companies to connect System Engineering, BIM and the Quality Assurance law

The building industry is based on a collaboration environment. This requires repeated, iterative data exchanges and communication among different domains and applications in a high frequency. To automate information processing, standardized and qualified data is necessary for efficient working processes (Zhang, 2015). As the complexity level of the design and construction processes is increasing, traditional information medium such as paper-based documents cannot satisfy the required integrity, precision and timeliness (Zhang, 2015). The concept of Building Information Modeling (BIM), Systems Engineering (SE) and the Quality Assurance Law (QAL) are contribute to achieve this. These concepts form the base elements for this graduation thesis.
The need for computerizing and automating the requirements checking is becoming more critical. Based on the problem area, this research outlines the next main research question:
“How can the validation and verification of requirements for construction works be visualized in phase 2 and 3 of the System Engineering process (definition/design/ development/implementation), based on open standards and software (visual programming)? And how can this be documented based on the Quality Assurance act?”
Based on open standards (IFC and SE exchange standard), visual programming and the four classes of functionality a requirement checking system should support from Eastman (2009) a data integration platform is developed to connect BIM, SE and the QAL.
The tool should be further developed in the future. Firstly, a limitation of the tool is limited use of valuable data in an IFC-file. In addition, an opportunity for development the tool is to make the generic tool more specific for use.