ADOPTING BIM TECHNOLOGY TO EMPOWER THE STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT PROCESS FOR LARGE SCALE INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Stakeholder engagement provides a platform for multiple stakeholders to exchange views and opinions, identify common objectives and negotiate diverse interests about the project in a decision-making and policy-making activities. Through this process, the interests of various stakeholders can be systematically captured and built into the decided scheme, which could increase the chance of project success and improve the long-term viability and benefits to the community. During the stakeholder engagement process, several problems have been recognized that obstruct the progress of the process. Currently, a more effective and comprehensive technology is lacking to streamline the stakeholder engagement process. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a revolutionary development, which is quickly reshaping the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industries. The performance and productivity of a building’s design, construction, operation and maintenance process can be improved by using BIM. Therefore, in this research, investigating the feasibility of applying BIM to facilitate the stakeholder engagement has been conducted. Two research objectives are established for this approach. One is to explore the problems in current stakeholder engagement process and to investigate the existing BIM features in current construction industry. The other is to develop a framework that uses BIM features to empower the stakeholder engagement process. The research methodology has been meticulously chosen in order to approach the thesis appropriately. The qualitative research methodology has been adopted to understand the experiences, beliefs and views of the interviewees. Hence, semi-structured interviews have been selected to mine the depth and detail information for this research. Moreover, a thorough desktop study has been conducted to collect information from existing resource. Besides, Liker scaling, designed equation and mean value ranking method have been adopted to analyze the results from the interviews. Through a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the collected information, it is affirmed that most of BIM features have the potential to resolve problems in stakeholder engagement, with the exception of only the transparency problem. However, the effectiveness of this feature could be increased as the BIM has been extensively used in the construction industry in Singapore.