Building Information Modeling for a Smart and Sustainable Urban Space

5GeoBIM: Towards a Convergence of BIM and 3D GIS

5.1. Introduction

Intelligent and sustainable management of 3D urban space requires at least two scales of study. The first scale concerns the building as a reference urban object that is at the center of several urban issues. The second scale concerns the building’s environment at the city or neighborhood level. Taking into account the richness and correlations between urban themes and also between urban objects (buildings, networks, vegetation, etc.), an integration of the two scales of analysis is necessary for the rigorous and relevant study of an urban space in all its dimensions. The result of this integration is the GeoBIM concept. It is a hybrid process combining information from BIM (at the building scale) and GIS (at the neighborhood, city, region, etc. scales).

BIM was initially developed for buildings and later extended to other urban objects such as infrastructure. With the increase in the number of applications requiring richer geometric and semantic data on urban space, BIM has taken on another urban dimension (multi-scale BIM), applying to a larger urban context by integrating several urban objects. Multi-scale BIM is not a simple extension of 3D modeling to the elements of an urban space but requires a management of the relationships between the objects of the digital model. Thus, an integration between BIM and CIM (City Information Modeling) through the concept of GeoBIM offers a framework of interoperability ...