A BIM-Enabled System for Evaluating Impacts of Construction Change Orders

Change orders lead to the modification of construction works, which has a direct impact on various aspects of construction projects, including scope, budget, and schedule. The traditional change order process involves the production and communication of a significant amount of information, usually in the form of paper-based documents that are mostly narrative and not well organized. It is therefore difficult for all project participants to understand the physical changes to the construction work and identify the information necessary for determining the resulting time and cost impacts. These challenges point to the need for an integrated decision support system that can assist project stakeholders to visualize the physical alterations, to manage the pertinent information, to perform quantity takeoff, and to assess the impacts of construction changes, all of which can be facilitated by building information modeling (BIM). This paper develops a BIM-based system that can be used to evaluate the impacts of construction change orders. The proposed system focuses on quantifying three major impacts of change orders in construction projects, namely, physical conditions, schedule, and budget. The system architecture and integration of several BIM-enabled tools, including Autodesk Revit, Dynamo, Microsoft Excel, and VBA are presented. Given a particular construction change order, the system automatically detects the altered building elements and evaluates the schedule and cost impacts of the proposed change. This system can assist all project participants in visualizing and quantifying the impacts of construction change. It can also enhance the accuracy of time-cost impact evaluations as well as facilitate the overall change management process.