Industry Input for Construction Engineering and Management Courses: Development of a Building Systems Coordination Exercise for Construction Engineering and Management Students

The coordination of mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection systems involves locating equipment and routing heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning duct, water supply piping, sanitary drainage piping, and electrical conduit and raceway, as well as fire protection systems in a manner that satisfies many different types of constraint. The process has historically been a major challenge for the specialty contractors who fabricate and install these systems. Prior to the development of building information modeling (BIM) technology, the coordination of these building systems involved sequentially comparing and overlaying shop drawings to detect and eliminate spatial and functional interferences between the numerous systems. With BIM, which is able to provide a virtual construction solution where the design (three-dimensional), schedule (four-dimensional), cost (five-dimensional), and life cycle analysis (six-dimensional) can be interlinked, the process has been able to evolve, and the challenges of identifying and resolving physical interferences have been significantly reduced. However, many challenges still remain, and without adequate background and knowledge regarding the functionality of these systems, the likelihood that the results of the process will yield a poorly coordinated system is still high. Factors including systems performance, safety, and constructability must also be taken into account. Lack of knowledge and faulty assumptions often mislead personnel during the process to accepting results produced using BIM technology. This paper describes the development of a meaningful building systems coordination. Exercises for construction engineering and management students were designed in collaboration between academia and industry to enhance awareness and the knowledge required to produce a well-coordinated system.