Applications of BIM: A Brief Review and Future Outline

This paper surveys building information modeling (BIM) development using classification and literature review of articles for the last decade (2000-2016) to explore how various BIM methodologies have been developed during this period. Based on the selected journals of different BIM applications and different online database of BIM, this article surveys and classifies BIM applications into ten different categories such as education system, medical system, economic system, electrical and electronics system, traffic control, image processing and feature extraction, manufacturing and system modeling, forecasting and predictions, BIM enhancements and social sciences. For each of these categories, this paper mentions a brief future outline. This review study indicates mainly three types of future development directions for BIM methodologies, domains and article types: (1) BIM methodologies are tending to be developed toward expertise orientation. (2) It is suggested that different social science methodologies could be implemented using BIM as another kind of expert methodology. (3) The ability to continually change and learning capability is the driving power of BIM methodologies and will be the key for future intelligent applications.