Abstract:

New technologies and tools used in BIM (Building Information Modeling) process enable information exchange among different involved stakeholders in a project, from the initial conception to the final demolition. Qatar’s future construction projects will shift to mid-sized scale, as the country has already completed and tendered a large infrastructure around the football World-Cup 2022 mega-event. SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) should learn from the example of large-scale organizations and adopt BIM solutions and lifecycle concepts. This demands higher BIM skills and capabilities. Therefore, BIM concepts and collaborative workflows need to be included in tertiary educational programs to support current and prepare future industry practitioners. Many academic institutions around the world have either created new courses or added BIM into existing courses and programs. BIM education curricula need to cover both discipline-specific and multidisciplinary BIM deliverables and workflows, as BIM technologies, processes and protocols impact all disciplines and roles along the construction supply chain. A BIM education framework is needed to help universities in Qatar as they plan to introduce BIM topics into their curricula, and to foster the collaborative development and delivery of learning units, and integrated programs. This paper explores how to incorporate lifecycle approaches into a typical university BIM curriculum. It deals with the feature of BIM collaborative processes that involves sharing information models developed and maintained across the lifecycle of the building/infrastructure and manage all those information generated throughout the entire lifecycle of any built asset.

Keywords:

BIM (Building Information Modeling), Higher Education, Lifecycle Management, Construction Industry.