Structuring a BIM Service Scoping, Tendering, Executing, and Wrapping-Up (STEW) Guide for Public Owners

Abstract

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been one of the most dominant trends in the construction industry worldwide. In Korea, since 2012, public construction projects worth more than USD 40 million have been subject to the application of BIM. However, many public owners have hesitated to adopt BIM for their projects; they generally view BIM as being very complex to manage and difficult to understand. In 2021, the Korean governmental entity in charge of developing the public policies to furnish quality infrastructure requested a variety of individual public owners to prepare BIM guidelines fit to the infrastructures they manage. While there are diverse BIM guides available for them to refer to in preparing the BIM guidelines, these involve certain deficiencies in meeting the public owners’ preferences, such as being tailored for the public procurement process. The main objectives of this study were to investigate the desirable nature of an owner-oriented BIM guide, suggest the structure of the guide, and identify the major advisory contents to be included in the guide. To achieve these research objectives, a number of domestic and international BIM guides were analyzed, and workshops were operated twice with 12 BIM experts from the Korean construction industry. As a result of the study, a four-stage guide structure was developed consisting of the BIM service Scoping, Tendering, Executing, and Wrapping-up (STEW) guides.