Structural design developed in a BIM environment

This paper presents an extract of a dissertation entitled "Structural design developed in a BIM environment", written by Francesco Labate student in Building Engineering at the Polytechnic of Bari. The study was supervised by Eng. Francesco Porco, Professor in “Construction Techniques”, and conducted thanks to the support of Graitec, which provided licenses to the software used in the case study.

Francesco Labate writes: “Contemporary society is experiencing a deep transformation due to the diffusion of information technologies (IT), which are radically changing the way we live, work, generate documents and exchange information. The technological innovation is leading to a gradual change of the design philosophy in the building sector. In recent times, the acronym BIM (Building Information Modeling), better indicated as BIMM (Building Information Modeling & Management), has become a subject of increasing interest in the building sector, starting from the project idea, up to the management of the building”

The thesis investigates about BIM in all its aspects, focusing on the use of BIM in the structural field through a case study. Autodesk Revit® 2019 and Graitec Advance Design® 2019 were the two BIM software used for the design, perfectly communicating with each other.

“When downloading the Graitec Power Pack during the installation of Advance Design 2019, the two software will communicate perfectly with each other, allowing quick and accurate exchange of information. All this benefits communication between the different actors of the building process. If, for example, those who design the architectural model in Revit, were to change a component of the building organism (change a material, change the type of floor, etc.), the model could be exported again in Advance Design.In this way, the designer in charge of the structural calculation, will not have to recreate the model and rework all the calculations, but simply import the new model and redo the FEM calculation with the structural calculation program.”, conclude Labate into his dissertation.