BIM-enabled Modular and Industrialized Construction in China

Abstract

The Chinese construction market is huge in terms of its size but facing many issues not matching its high speed development, such as low field productivity, unreliable quality, high resource and energy consumption, often safety accidents, and significant environment pollution. Those issues are mainly associated with the old fashion of construction method. The concept of industrialization of construction has been recognized since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, but did not get well developed until recently the industry is under the pressure of increasing labour cost and the demand of sustainable development. There was a surge of Building Information Modeling (BIM) application in last few years in China and the industry has seen lots of benefits of virtual design and construction. Integrating BIM technology into industrialization of construction is seen as a promising opportunity to improve the performance of modular and industrialized construction. This paper first reviews the history of industrialization of the Chinese construction industry and then discusses the recent BIM adoption in China. The approaches of using BIM to enable modular design and industrialized construction and installation in China are the main focus of this paper.