Integrated design of reinforced concrete buildings in a BIM environment

Resumo

A lean solution demands that not only the final result must be efficient, but the whole process also needs
to have its efficiency improved. The collaboration between engineers and architects in the design process within
BIM methodology is a way of achieve this objective. However, much of the research effort has focused in the
development and usage of 3D modeling software packages rather than in the direction of integrating the design
teams. In this work, a design process is proposed to facilitate the integration between the structural and the
architectural designs at early stages of the process. To help the implementation of the proposed process an
Autodesk Revit plugin, named ConDA, was developed. It allows the architect to perform preliminary verifications
of reinforced concrete structures at an earlier stage in the design process, which avoids the conception of unfeasible
structures and facilitates the communication between architects and structural engineers. Introducing ConDA to
the design workflow has the potential to reduce the number of design reviews and, consequently, the time spent
during design.