Building Information Modeling for a Smart and Sustainable Urban Space

3Development of the BIM Model

3.1. Introduction

Several fields such as indoor navigation, cadastre, construction engineering, building management and energy efficiency require accurate and detailed 3D models of buildings. Other applications require, in addition, the consideration of the interactions between the building and its geographical environment. This is the case for real estate expertise, urban management and the broader concept of smart cities. Between these applications, the differences lie in the requirements in geometric and semantic precision and in the level of detail of the digital models.

With the concept of smart cities and the multiplicity of sustainable development applications, urban digital models must be rich enough to encapsulate several uses and respond to several urban issues. In addition to geometry, the semantics of the models are of major importance, allowing them to be used as real tools for urban management.

Many 3D modeling approaches have been proposed during the past few decades. However, despite the progress made in computer vision, photogrammetry and LiDAR technologies, the automatic reconstruction of 3D urban scenes is still a very active field of research, and some technical challenges still need to be solved.

This chapter presents the basis for the production of a BIM model and the main approaches developed for the 3D reconstruction of its objects, in particular, buildings.

3.2. Issues around 3D urban models

In the field of Earth sciences, ...