Transformational Change: BIM-Led Indoor Environments for Public Universities in the United States

Indoor environmental factors are shown to have a significant correlation with its occupants. Temperature, humidity, ventilation, natural and artificial lighting, noise—sound and speech, natural view, aesthetics, and sustainability, all contribute towards the productivity, health, and overall well-being of its occupants. These factors if left unattended are shown to significantly impact the return on investment (ROI) for different stakeholders, including students, faculty, staff, and the university system. To analyze all these variables along with other project requirements during policy making, master planning, and designing is a cognitively un-accomplishable task. The overall problem becomes a complex decision making problem with billion scenarios to choose from, which eventually results in consideration of measurable factors such as costs, aesthetics, information technology, and ignoring factors that are either difficult to measure or yet not measurable such as interaction of noise with classroom lectures. This research hypothesizes that BIM integrated with simulation led decision support system for university classrooms will capture and address the problem of indoor environment decision making. A case study is presented for one component (acoustics) of the integrated model for classroom value evaluation.