Flexibility of BIM towards Design Change

Change orders in construction industry have transformed this business into a complicated and laborious one. Even in BIM projects change orders are inevitable but they can be managed more efficiently. BIM tools are mature tools capable of producing Construction Documents with higher quality compared to 2D CAD software and are suitable for providing better information for downstream use. The aim of this paper is to reveal some of the limitations of BIM applications that are faced by BIM experts to identify the flexibility of these tools in applying changes. It is hypothesized that changes have been taken place in BIM projects. A questionnaire was designed and distributed among professionals and BIM experts. They were asked to reply to the questionnaire to evaluate the ease of applying changes and pinpoint the limitations of BIM tools. It was concluded that BIM Tools suffer from some shortcomings such as inability to produce design change comparative deviation report, unreliability of bidirectional links between external analysis software and BIM tools, not having a powerful user interface and lacking enough artificial intelligence to analyze and offer alternatives to design changes. It has been noticed that the current tools have the potential to improve in the future to aid experts in achieving a more efficient workflow