2015 Best Paper Award

As our academic and professional community continues to strive for excellence, it is important that we recognize outstanding contributions. Jing Du, Rui Liu, and Raja R. A. Issa are coauthors of an article entitled “BIM Cloud Score: Benchmarking BIM Performance,” which appeared in the November 2014 issue of the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000891. This article has been selected as the 2015 Best Paper for the ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management.

This article describes the development of a system that benchmarks the performance of an organization in the use of building information modeling (BIM). The benchmarking system obtains data when users allow an application to operate in the background of their processor while in the process of developing a BIM. The background process sends modeling metrics (but no proprietary information) to a cloud-based analysis system. This system compares metrics from other modeling efforts and returns the comparisons to the modeler who can identify aspects of the modeling process that are most in need of improvement and focus improvement efforts appropriately. The system accommodates a startup phase when little actual data would be available by seeding the initial comparative analysis process with expert opinions; as the system is used by actual modelers, the expert opinions are replaced by actual data. The article clearly explains the considerable amount of technical detail required to understand how the system could be implemented in a practical way. The system will allow BIM users to quickly move the state-of-the-art forward with considerable benefit to the civil engineering profession.

Knowledge from this paper will help practitioners and researchers by:

I want to express my heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to the Awards Committee [Yong Bai, Paul Goodrum, Charles T. Jahren (Chair), Young Hoon Kwak, SangHyun Lee, Amlan Mukherjee, Mani Golparvar-Fard, and John E. Taylor] for undertaking this assignment, and for executing it in such a professional, transparent, and timely manner.