BIM4EEBDr. Sonia Lupica Spagnolo (Politecnico di Milano, aka Polimi) is member of the Executive Board of the BIM4EEB project. She is a researcher in Building Production in the department of Architecture, Built environment and Construction engineering (ABC Department). Polimi is one of the top-rated technological universities in Europe, according to QS World University Ranking, besides representing the largest School of architecture, design and engineering in Italy. Sustainability is a key topic that entered all the research streams of this university, from energy, to mobility, ICT, management and, finally, built environment.
Sonia led the activities on “Definition of requirements for an efficient renovation process”, that has already been accomplished after the first 6 months of the project, i.e. in June 2019. During this period a deep analysis of the workflow of renovation processes was undertaken, considering every stage of the building process and all involved actors. Both the point of view of private and public sector were considered and adopted, developing a framework that can be used in different EU Countries. The final aim of BIM4EEB is to optimise information exchange during the project life cycle, thanks to the implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Building Information Modelling (BIM) methods. With this in mind, the analysis defined: every activity of the building renovation process; all the involved stakeholders (e.g. designers, architects, construction and service companies operators, tenants, etc.); information requirements for stage of the process; and finally suggesting possible optimization of the information exchange process, avoiding possible inefficiencies of the toolkit.
As work leader, my role was to provide scientific and technical coordination to the partners involved in the five different tasks of this part of the project. Polimi was leading activities of Task 2.1 Process analysis and definition of relevant activities and involved stakeholders, Task 2.3 Definition of construction companies’ needs and requirements, and Task 2.4 Definition of service companies’ needs and requirements. Task 2.2 List of designers’ needs and requirements for BIM-based renovation processes was led by VTT, while Task 2.5 List of owners’ and inhabitants’ needs and requirements for BIM-based renovation processes was led by Suite5.
Thanks to the coordination of this work I had the opportunity to collaborate with all partners belonging to the BIM4EEB Consortium, who provided important contributions in a so detailed definition of information requirements for a renovation process.
Relevant activities and stakeholders of renovation processes have been listed and tracked in a process map, considering both the public and private ownership scenario Identifying the informative workflows. This analysis has helped in finding out how BIM technologies can improve data exchange in the existing context, with a focus on how a BIM-based scenario simulator for energy-related decision-making can be supported by energy analysis input requirements for different refurbishment strategies.
Our work has outlined all the necessary information requirements based on a very detailed Process Map that describes the renovation process and the possible interactions among different actors. Such outcome is necessary for the implementation of users’ profiles and database structure of the BIM management system but also for the ontology development.