Building Information Modeling

In addition to the nanotechnology, I am also interested in large scale automated visual data collection, processing, and interpretation for effective construction and infrastructure management. As appeared in the industry, more and more civil engineers have begun to utilize visual data, such as 2-D/3-D photo images and laser scanned point clouds to control construction progress in their daily work. Designers need as-is geometric and color information of a building for a renovation design. Constructors need 3-D images of a construction site for equipment tracking, safety management, and construction tolerance analysis. Facility managers need the building deformation history and crack information of a facility for regular condition assessments and maintenance planning. Furthermore, how to efficiently and effectively utilize those visual sensors and large data collected is critical, because the data interpretation involves a lot of repetitive manual operations, and any improper operation can cause inaccurate evaluation results. So it is crucial to enable automatic operations to streamline the utilization of 2-D/3-D image data in construction. Building Information Modeling (BIM) enables civil engineers to describe their designs in terms of building components, spaces, and relationships between those objects in terms of a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a building. The resulting BIM becomes a shared knowledge resource to support decision-making about a building from earliest conceptual stages, through design and construction.