A review of risk management through BIM and BIM-related technologies

Risk management in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry is a global issue. Failure to adequately manage risks may not only lead to difficulties in meeting project objectives but also influence land-use planning and urban spatial design in the future growth of cities. Due to the rapid development and adoption of BIM (Building Information Modelling) and BIM-related digital technologies, the use of these technologies for risk management has become a growing research trend leading to a demand for a thorough review of the state-of-the-art of these developments. This paper presents a summary of traditional risk management, and a comprehensive and extensive review of published literature concerning the latest efforts of managing risk using technologies, such as BIM, automatic rule checking, knowledge based systems, reactive and proactive IT (information technology)-based safety systems. The findings show that BIM could not only be utilised to support the project development process as a systematic risk management tool, but it could also serve as a core data generator and platform to allow other BIM-based tools to perform further risk analysis. Most of the current efforts have concentrated on investigating technical developments, and the management of construction personnel safety has been the main interest so far. Because of existing technical limitations and the lack of “human factor” testing, BIM-based risk management has not been commonly used in real environments. In order to overcome this gap, future research is proposed that should (1) have a multi-disciplinary system-thinking, (2) investigate implementation methods and processes, (3) integrate traditional risk management with new technologies, and (4) support the development process.