An investigation into the implementation of Building Information Modeling in the Middle East

Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. There have been many changes in the past few years in the use of BIM and how to implement BIM in the AEC Industry. The purpose of this research is to examine the current status of BIM in the Middle East by exploring the extent of adoption of BIM among stakeholders in the AEC industry in this region. To this end surveys were sent out to 297 and empirical statistics have been applied. The respondents acknowledged they were aware of the benefits of BIM in terms of it being a more effective method for designing and managing construction projects by supporting collaboration, improving the quality of the design by providing the ability to closely visualize designs in 3D and rendered forms and providing a platform which would facilitate the sharing of information relevant for design, construction and maintenance of buildings over their entire lifecycle. However, only 20% of AEC organizations in the Middle East are using BIM or are in the process of adopting BIM, with more professionals beginning to adopt BIM although most professionals within this region still look at BIM just as an advanced AutoCAD tool. Raising awareness related to the benefits of BIM and increasing training opportunities in the Middle East are necessary in order to allow all stakeholders to benefit substantially from BIM. Copyright: © 2017 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.