Integration of Lessons Learned Knowledge in Building Information Modeling

Lessons learned systems are vital means for integrating construction knowledge into the various phases of the construction project life cycle. Many such systems are tailored toward the owner-organization’s specific needs and workflows to overcome challenges with information collection, documentation, and retrieval. Previous works have relied on the development of conventional local and network/cloud-based database management systems to store and retrieve lessons gathered on projects. These lessons learned systems operate independently and have not been developed to take full advantage of the benefits of integration with emerging building information modeling (BIM) technology. As such, construction professionals are faced with a lack of efficient and speedy retrieval of context-focused information on lessons learned for appropriate utilization in projects. To tackle this challenge, we propose the integration of lessons learned knowledge management in BIM in addition to existing two-dimensional to eight-dimensional modeling of project information. The integration was implemented through the embedding of nonstructured query system, NoSQL (MongoDB), in a BIM-enabled environment to host lessons learned information linked to model items and four-dimensional modeling project tasks of the digitized model. This is beyond existing conventional text-based queries and is novel. The system is implemented in .NET Frameworks and interfaced with a project management BIM tool, Navisworks Manage. The demonstration with a test case of a federated model from a predesign school project suggests that lessons learned systems can become an integral part of BIM environments and contribute to enhancing knowledge reuse in projects.