Beyond The Clash: Investigating Bim-Based Building Design Coordination Issue Representation And Resolution

Successful management of the building design coordination process is critical to the efficient delivery of cost-effective and quality projects. Building information modeling (BIM) has had a significant impact on design coordination, supporting the identification and management of 'clashes' between building systems. However, many design coordination issues go beyond the traditional definition of a 'clash' and either go undetected or require further time, resources, and expertise to resolve. The goal of this research is to better understand the causes of coordination issues and the factors that affect their resolution. Specifically, we developed a taxonomy of design coordination issues and an ontology that defines the relationships between physical, process, and model-based design issues. We applied the taxonomy to two case studies and analyzed the frequency of issue types, the distribution of issue types across disciplines, and the resolution rates of issue types. We found that the most frequent causes of design coordination issues were design discrepancy, design error, clashes and missing items. The most common design coordination issue across both case studies was design error. The temporal and functional design issues took the longest time to resolve and missing information took the least amount of time. Design discrepancies were least likely to be resolved by the end of design coordination. The taxonomy was validated through inter-coder reliability testing. The experts we interviewed confirmed that the taxonomy of coordination issues could improve design coordination processes, particularly in the issue identification stage prior to communicating the issue with the team.