In recent years, Building Information Modelling (BIM) methodology has seen exponential growth in its adoption within the construction industry. Despite its tentative beginnings in a sector traditionally resistant to major changes, the undeniable advantages it offers have made all stakeholders, from designers to builders, including government authorities and facility maintainers, aware of the need to embrace the full implementation of BIM standards in the sector.

Nonetheless, the adoption of BIM methodology presents its own set of challenges. Despite not being a novel approach, BIM has not reached a level of maturity where a universally accepted standard or a singular implementation method has been established. The multitude of BIM use cases is steadily expanding alongside a growing variety of applications, increasing expertise, and the continuous enhancement of software capabilities.

The document management aspect associated with BIM methodology represents its true potential. This entails the ability to centralise the geometry and all attributes associated with an element within a single element that can be shared and interacted with by all stakeholders. This management poses an additional challenge, as it requires clear protocols to ensure that information is exchangeable and exportable between parties. Standardisation within a given market will be much simpler if government authorities establish the standards.

Attempting to compile a comprehensive document on the state of the art of BIM methodology would be a daunting and potentially unproductive task, given that new papers with innovative BIM applications and uses emerge practically every week and with the increasing number of specialised books. Moreover, professionals responsible for designing, constructing, or maintaining structures derive limited benefit from an overly lengthy document that encompasses all possibilities.

Therefore, the objective of Task Group 1.7 (TG 1.7) has been to present concepts that enable readers to gain a basic understanding of the methodology that is sufficiently up-to-date, along with specific examples of its use in various types of structures with varying degrees of complexity. The aim has been to show that BIM usage can range from a specific element of a project to the complete life cycle of a structure, allowing stakeholders to choose what suits their needs best.

The fib Task Group 1.7 is confident that this document will be a useful resource for construction professionals, bringing BIM methodology into their everyday use and thus making the construction industry more modern, efficient, and sustainable.

Environmental sustainability and adaptation to climate change are two of several reasons floating structures are of great interest. Their resilience toward rising water levels and the possibility they allow to avoid additional land use are two specific factors that have influenced a flourishing of studies on floating structures and also several applications, for example in the transport field or in food and energy production. Moving from land to water implies taking care of a new complex environment throughout all the phases of the construction and during the whole life cycle of the structure. It is necessary to take care of the marine environment since the early phases of the conceptual design of the structure, to really consider the environment as one of the decisional information on the best-suited solution for each specific case, avoiding later costly mitigation measures and using the possibility to create environmental benefits with the change. The working party WP 1.2.3 of TG 1.2 of Fib presents in the present paper the potential environmental risks and potential benefits for concrete floating structures to promote an increased awareness of the marine environment with the involvement of different expertise from the early phases of the project.

Awareness of design risks is essential for preparing integrated design and construction tenders as decisions in this phase can have serious consequences once the project is awarded. The practice of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) promises to support contractors in dealing with risks in the decision-making process. However, due to limited time and resources in a tender, risks involved in design alternatives are often overlooked and the selection of alternatives is mainly based on the decision-makers’ knowledge and experience. This raises the question how decision makers can become aware of the risks in the tender phase of projects. Following a design science research approach three interventions to raise risk awareness are identified and validated in the context of an infrastructure tender in the Netherlands. These interventions are (1) a general list of defined criteria to identify those criteria that correspond with the characteristics of the tender; (2) mapping identified project risks on criteria and assign a bandwidth score; (3) evaluation of the quality of the decision process by scoring elements of decision quality. Based on these interventions three design rules are proposed to increase the transparency of decision problems and the understanding of choices and, by doing so, create awareness for risks involved in design alternatives.

Design decision-making in infrastructure tenders is a challenging task for contractors due to limited time and resources. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) promises to support contractors in dealing with this challenge. However, the ability of MCDA to ensure decision quality in the specific context of infrastructure tenders has gained little attention. By undertaking a longitudinal case study on early design decisions in a tender for a design-build project in the Netherlands the relationship between MCDA and decision quality is investigated. The case results show that in the early tender phase the decision making very much relies on the experience and knowledge of engineers. If MCDA is inappropriately used in such a context it can create impressions of soundly underpinned evaluations of design options while neglecting uncertainties and leading to low-quality decision. Although MCDA defines the “what” is required for structuring the decision problem, it does not support decision-makers in the “how” to do it. The explicit consideration of decision quality elements in MCDA can support the “how” and can create awareness for decision makers concerning importance, scope and uncertainty of criteria.