Media

A team led by Professor Wilson Lu, Dr Frank Xue and Dr Jinying Xu at iLab of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) is the sole winner in the “Professional Research” category of the buildingSMART International (bSI) Awards 2021, with the project “OpenBIM: Opening the gate for BIM and blockchain integration (OBBi)”. The results have been announced on October 7.

BIM (Building Information Modeling) is widely recognised as the most important development in the global construction industry over the past years. It is also highly promoted in Hong Kong, as evident in various Policy Addresses. It involves the use of a shared digital representation of a built asset to facilitate design, construction and operation processes to form a reliable basis for decisions. Whilst BIM development has achieved unprecedented success, current BIM is too much tied up with profit-seeking vendors.  

The bSI, or known as the “international home of BIM”, is an open, vendor-neutral, and not-for-profit body incorporated in the UK which pledges to promote OpenBIM by developing international standards to make BIM vendor-neutral and more interoperable. The bSI Awards is a prestigious international award programme initiated since 2018 to promote OpenBIM in the global architecture, engineering, and construction industry.

This year, there were 133 entries, predominantly from developed, BIM-advanced countries/ regions in the nine categories of the Awards, namely asset management, community contribution, construction, design, facility management, handover, professional research, student research and technology. A highly selective jury was formed to shortlist one to four finalists in each category, deliberating their presentations, and finally selecting a single winner from each category.

The OBBi submitted by iLab is the sole winner in the Professional Research category. It is also the sole winner from Hong Kong across all the 21 finalists.

About the winning project - OBBi
Through BIM and blockchain integration, BIM can take information from blockchain, e.g., material provenance, supply chain status, installation instructions, and contracts; and building information can be assigned to blockchain to be used later, e.g., for smart payment, procurement, traceability, or forensic investigation. However, there are three key obstacles. Firstly, existing commercial BIM software and blockchain lacks interoperability, which means they cannot talk to each other. Secondly, information will be too redundant if storing BIM in blockchain directly. And lastly, how to quickly retrieve the information from blockchain and restore it to BIM without data loss is an issue.

The iLab team developed an innovative idea to overcome the above obstacles by converting commercial BIM into OpenBIM format, calculating their changes, and putting the smaller files containing changes in blockchain; one can retrieve the information from blockchain and restore it onto BIM easily.

The team pilots the OBBi in the HKU Wong Chuk Hang (WCH) modular integrated construction (MiC) Student Residence project. The OBBi is being used to track the provenance, production status, logistics status, and assembly status of MiC modules that are produced in Mainland China and then transported to Hong Kong for assembly. By integrating BIM in blockchain, stakeholders need not worry about information tampering and quality disputes as the information in blockchain is guaranteed with authenticity and reliability. During the mock-up process of this pilot project, the OBBi system demonstrates that BIM exchange and versioning can be much faster and more reliable than traditional files. Moreover, OBBi demonstrates its power to re-connect the fragmented AEC processes in MiC projects that have been further exacerbated by the border restrictions resulting from COVID-19.

Three most innovative features of the OBBi: (1) Tidying up OpenBIM format for BIM and blockchain integration; (2) Inventing an innovative methodology to blockchain BIM changes only; and (3) Developing a novel approach to retrieve information from blockchain and restore it to BIM without time delay or information loss. The innovations are exactly what the bSI pursues along its OpenBIM pledge. The jury believes these innovations will advance OpenBIM, and as such, OBBi managed to stand out from all the competing projects.

About iLab
iLab was established in 2016 under the Faculty of Architecture as an urban big data lab to take the opportunities and challenges as instigated by the global visions of Smart City and Industry 4.0. (FoA).  It has made significant break-through in modernizing the construction industry in Hong Kong and beyond.  The award winning project is supported by an Innovation and Technology Fund: “BIM Square: Blockchain and i-Core-enabled Multi-stakeholder Building Information Modelling Platform for Construction Logistics and Supply Chain Management in Hong Kong”.

Media enquiries:
Communication and Public Affairs Office:
Ms Melanie Wan (Tel: 2859 2600 / Email: melwkwan@hku.hk)
Ms Rashida Suffiad (Tel: 2857 8555 / Email: rsuffiad@hku.hk)