A review of the implementation of building information modelling (BIM) in Hong Kong

Abstract

Under the trend of construction digitalization, Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology has been under rapid development and adopted by the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industries worldwide. An optimised adoption of BIM has proven to result in a wide range of benefits, such as cost reduction, reduction of errors, facilitation in decision making, project management, facility management, risk management, energy efficiency and sustainability. For this reason, many developed countries including the United Kingdom, Singapore, United States have mandated the use of BIM in public projects since the early 2010s. In the context of Hong Kong, the Development Bureau mandated the adoption of multiple BIM uses in 2017, which covers the public works project after 2018 with a contract sum of more than HKD$30 million. Besides, multiple local BIM standards and guidelines have been published by the Construction Industry Council (CIC), different government departments and statutory bodies to provide a standardized workflow to be referenced by BIM practitioners. Given this context, it is important to observe the response of the local AEC industries to the adoption of BIM so as to evaluate the effectiveness of the current policies and initiation. This dissertation aims to summarize and discuss the overall BIM implementation situation in Hong Kong, based on a series of literature reviews and a questionnaire survey to observe the BIM adoption status by the companies and organizations in the local AEC industries. The formulation of the questionnaire was based on the previous CIC BIM Adoption Surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020. In view of the low response rate of the questionnaire survey, previous CIC survey results were referenced and compared with the primary data collected in this research. According to the literature sources and the survey results, a number of noticeable patterns were summarized, including the long-sustained shortage of BIM expertise, the deficiencies in BIM education, and the slow adoption pace of BIM by the SMEs. These patterns were further discussed in the latter part of this dissertation. In summary, despite the research outcome suggesting that Hong Kong has reached a comparative BIM adoption rate to the BIM leading countries, there are still deep-rooted problems reflecting the shortcomings of the local BIM implementation and posing challenges to the long-term development of BIM in Hong Kong. This dissertation provides more insights into the context of the AEC industries and SMEs in particular and the challenges they are currently facing. Besides, two main recommendations were proposed in the dissertation. First, a review of the effectiveness of current BIM education and training should be conducted, to provide suitable training to nurture more capable BIM talents. Secondly, the government and professional bodies are advised to increase their support to SMEs economically and technically. These provide more references for the formulation of policies and initiatives by government departments and professional bodies. In addition, this dissertation has proposed new directions for the continuous study by the academy in the future.