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Road construction work has a multitude of impacts on its host environment, and the effect of these impacts varies according to the areas it crosses. Taking these impacts into account from the earliest stages of project planning is the ideal approach pursued by planners to ensure that their plans not only take these impacts into account but also mitigate their effects as much as possible. Drawing up a project schedule that considers the impact of the work requires an in-depth understanding of its scale, spatial extent, and timing. In practice, however, such an understanding is difficult to achieve due to the complex and variable nature of impacts. To help project planners understand the impacts of a road project from the outset so they can better plan mitigation measures, we have developed a conceptual framework for four-dimensional Building Information Modeling (4D BIM) deployment that visualizes the most significant impacts on the project site's surrounding environment in terms of their spatial extent and progression over time. By testing the method on a case study of a road improvement project in northwestern Quebec, the method shows that, compared with traditional 2D methods, the proposed 3D and 4D impact visualization modeling provides an integral perspective for visualizing and understanding spatial changes in project impacts over time and enables different possible project implementation variants to be evaluated with relative ease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of a common data environment (CDE) in the construction industry appears to be crucial for organizing and managing the flow of important information within construction projects effectively. However, it is observed that the investments and the costs associated with setting up such environments are often dissuasive, particularly for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). By launching the Plan BIM 2022 in 2017, the French government aimed to combat the emerging digital divide between large and small construction companies. At the heart of this state-funded plan was the development of a CDE-like collaborative platform called KROQI. The work presented in this article proposes a three-level matrix to characterize common data environments based on computer-supported collaboration work theories. The paper demonstrates how KROQI can be characterized as a level-2 CDE solution. Based on a preliminary study, it explores the perception and satisfaction of practitioners with respect to the features proposed by KROQI. The results show that, among the large variety of features proposed, some are hardly ever used. Therefore, while KROQI appears to be an excellent industry-wide solution aimed at federating initiatives towards digital collaboration centered around BIM models, there is definitely room for improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire safety regulations impose very strict requirements on building design, especially for buildings built with combustible materials. It is believed that it is possible to improve the management of these regulations with a better integration of fire protection aspects in the building information modeling (BIM) approach. A new BIM-based domain is emerging, the automated code checking, with its growing number of dedicated approaches. However, only very few of these works have been dedicated to managing the compliance to fire safety regulations in timber buildings. In this paper, the applicability to fire safety in the Canadian context is studied by constituting and executing a complete method from the regulations text through code-checking construction to result analysis. A design science approach is used to propose a code-checking method with a detailed analysis of the National Building Code of Canada (NBCC) in order to obtain the required information. The method starts by retrieving information from the regulation text, leading to a compliance check of an architectural building model. Then, the method is tested on a set of fire safety regulations and validated on a building model from a real project. The selected fire safety rules set a solid basis for further development of checking rules for the field of fire safety. This study shows that the main challenges for rule checking are the modeling standards and the elements' required levels of detail. The implementation of the method was successful for geometrical as well as non-geometrical requirements, although further work is needed for more advanced geometrical studies, such as sprinkler or fire dampers positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]