Analyzing project data in BIM with descriptive analytics to improve project performance

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to expand the benefits of building information modeling (BIM) to include data analytics to analyze construction project performance. BIM is a great tool which improves communication and information flow between construction project parties. This research aims to integrate different types of data within the BIM environment, then, to perform descriptive data analytics. Data analytics helps in identifying hidden patterns and detecting relationships between different attributes in the database. Design/methodology/approach This research is considered to be an inductive research that starts with an observation of integrating BIM and descriptive data analytics. Thus, the project's correspondence, daily progress reports and inspection requests are integrated within the project 5D BIM model. Subsequently, data mining comprising association analysis, clustering and trend analysis is performed. The research hypothesis is that descriptive data analytics and BIM have a great leverage to analyze construction project performance. Finally, a case study for a construction project is carried out to test the research hypothesis. Findings The research finds that integrating BIM and descriptive data analytics helps in improving project communication performance, in terms of integrating project data in a structured format, efficiently retrieving useful information from project raw data and visualizing analytics results within the BIM environment. Originality/value The research develops a dynamic model that helps in detecting hidden patterns and different progress attributes from construction project raw data.