A Serious Gaming Approach to Integrate BIM, IoT, and Lean Construction in Construction Education

Whereas building information modeling (BIM) and lean construction (LC) can be considered state-of-the-art practices in construction project design, planning, and control, internet of things (IoT) has yet a chance to connect processes in construction site monitoring applications and beyond. An opportunity might be that all of the aforementioned methods are hardly well enough integrated in a systematic way for purposes in knowledge-based decision making. A prominent example is that LC and associated simulation games in academic or professional education still rely much on manual data input and analysis. Proposed is a learning platform (a serious gaming environment) that teaches the concept of permanent availability of up-to-date actual performance data sets using an integrated BIM-IoT-LC approach. While the platform builds upon existing cloud-based BIM tools and well-known takt planning and takt control principles, a novel IoT platform was developed that rapidly elevates the gathering and transformation from data to information to knowledge while the participants play the game. The platform was tested in several academic learning environments around the world. Findings demonstrate the participants understand the important role of technology in practical applications. By extending their experiences from traditional LC simulation games with the BIM and IoT components, specifically, they were able to interact and collaborate more closely. Access to just-in-real-time project status information on smart wearable devices and large display screens helped improving the expected project execution timeline while reducing certain waste factors. One limitation that was discovered is the tight integration of the developed technology into new learning curricula that aim at digitalizing construction.