Abstract

Scope changes in construction can vary, and among all types of changes, design change by owner is the type that most often threatens a project with failure. Design changes requested by owners include additions, deletions and/or modifications to the original scope of the work. Design changes frequently impact project cost and time and have the potential to increase the possibility of conflicts between owners and contractors. Project time and cost change impact can become severe if owners do not consider the fact that a change in one part of the project may cause a series of changes in other parts of the project, which is known as the “change ripple effect.” Therefore, for the well-organized delivery of construction projects, it is essential to have an efficient design change management system. The fundamental objective of any change management system is to eliminate any unnecessary extra costs and time delays to the original contract. Therefore, there are two main factors to effectively manage design change: first, identifying the ripple effect of the design change on other project components, and second, quantifying the ripple effect of a change on project cost and time. Limited work has been conducted in this area and no integrated model has been developed that would be able to visualize, identifies and quantifies the above-mentioned factors. This thesis presents an automated model named BIM-Change for design professionals and owners that make it possible to visualize the ripple effects of owners’ design changes. The developed model calculates the impact of design changes and their ripple effect on a project’s total duration and updates the project schedule accordingly. It then estimates the impact of design changes, and their ripple effect, on project cost. The cost data provided by the developed model would be the updated project total cost including direct cost, indirect cost and impact cost. As result of the proposed model, the computer program called BIM-Change was developed using the “Visual C#. Net” programming language. This program consists of six add-ins: Check Change, Ripple Effect, Room Grouping, Time Impact, and Cost Impact, Data Filtering. The model has been applied to a case study to demonstrate its usefulness, illustrate its essential features, and facilitate its evaluation. The result validated the advantages of the BIM-Change over the available software such as Vico, Innovaya, Autodesk Navisworks, Synchro and Assemble.