A BIM-based approach to automate the design and coordination process of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems

ABSTRACT The design and spatial coordination of mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection systems (MEP) have become a major challenge for successful project delivery. Traditionally, MEP coordination has been conducted based on overlaying 2D drawings from different trades to detect functional and spatial interferences between MEP systems. Such coordination is time consuming and of low efficiency. Recently, the advent and development of Building Information Modelling (BIM) have significantly changed this process by affording a visual and collaborative manner. However, it still needs much manual work and many rounds of coordination as the conventional 2D design was still used. Therefore, this paper proposes a well-defined approach based on BIM to improve the workflow and automate the process by developing an MEP rule-based automated engine using Revit Application Programming Interface (API) tool. The engine is developed primarily to help analyse available ceiling zone for MEP elements in the first phase and then extended to facilitate rule-based routing in the second phase. The proposed approach is verified and validated by an illustrative example, followed by a real-life MEP design case. The result shows that with the help of the proposed approach, clashes and the number of coordination iteration are reduced substantially.