A Survey About BIM Interoperability and Collaboration Between Design and Construction

BIM interoperability has been recognized as a strong brake to BIM collaboration and is a very active research field. This paper systematically reviews 80 applicative articles about BIM collaboration and interoperability recently published, in order to analyze the different trends and to create an understandable map of the subject for researchers. The subject is analysed in three analytical frameworks: (1) the AEC context in which collaboration and interoperability issues are raised, (2) the collaborative goal of BIM interoperability, and (3) BIM collaboration and interoperability suggested solutions. The main findings of this paper are three research gaps: (1) BIM collaboration and interoperability are not often conjointly addressed; (2) solving approaches rarely consider the problem though the trivial angle of data querying and retrieval; (3) interoperability for geometrically complex BIM models could receive more attention. Research perspectives are consequently deducted.