BIM Application for Quantity Take-off and Cost Estimation of Plumbing System in Buildings
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Lin, Chun-Fu
Abstract
In civil construction, MEP (Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing) engineering is the most complex one in buildings. In order to avoid conflicts and interference among MEP systems, many construction projects are in need of building information model (BIM), which is a 3D tool for diverse physical infrastructures planning and design. Despite the increasing requirements for BIM by owners of building construction, MEP designers are not willing to use BIM due to the expense and time spent on BIM technique adaption. Instead, most designers prefer to design MEP by 2D drafting and therefore estimate cost of MEP engineering in traditional way. However, part of traditional cost estimation of MEP engineering is rough approximation instead of detailed estimation, which makes the origin of cost invisible and inaccurate. The purpose of this research was to visualize and clearly estimate the indistinct budget items which traditional estimating methods are unable to calculate in detail, and verified the usability and accuracy of BIM QTO/cost estimation of the plumbing system. By building the whole architecture model, structure and detailed plumbing components of a finished public office building, the study discovered that there was some overestimation of plumbing budgets by MEP designers, which could let MEP designers gain more invisible profit without owner’s detection. However, with a thorough inspection of the MEP families of BIM software, it was found in this study that some constraints on the BIM tool led to more than one-third of the overall plumbing budget still unable to be output by BIM. The BIM main software’s capability of quantity take-off and cost estimation on plumbing system hasn’t been fully developed.
Subjects
BIM
MEP
plumbing
QTO
cost estimation
SDGs
Type
thesis
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ntu-104-R02521708-1.pdf
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23.32 KB
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