Sonali Dhopte speaks on BIM adoption in smart cities at construction world
This July 2015, Construction world released an article focusing on the challenges faced by the Indian Government in implementing the Smart Cities projects. As the Indian government has planned to launch smart solutions to meet the need of growing urbanization and has approved 100 smart cities project in India.
Many industry experts contributed different solutions to the challenges highlighted in the article. Like,
Mr. Pratap Padode (@pratappadode) says, ¨The Smart Cities mission and AMRUT are likely to infuse a total of Rs 400,000 crore, once integrated with other missions like Digital India, Swachh Bharat, Housing for All, etc.¨
Mr. Kanwaljeet Singh, Business Development, Energy and Smart Cities, Schneider Electric India say’s “At present, only Lavasa near Pune can be classified as a smart city. Other cities (such as Mumbai and Delhi) are still in the process of upgrading their systems and could qualify as smart in the future.¨
¨We have been talking to these cities about the best way to do this, following which they will come up with their procurement procedures,¨ says Aamer Azeemi, Managing Director, Cisco, adding that the company is in discussion with many cities. ¨We have done the complete smart city planning for four cities in the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor,¨ he shares.
Similarly under the “Utility and Solutions” section where there are two components to any smart city: Physical infrastructure and software. Every city, from ancient times to now, has required roads, water, power, parks, security, transportation, shopping, food production, and services of different types for its citizens. What has changed is that all these facilities can now be designed using the analysis of data. Therefore, you get smarter roads where traffic lights are coordinated with the amount of traffic and smarter water by measuring the amount of water being consumed and then planning how much to buy, how much to clean and purify, and how much to store and distribute. While smarter power and the fine granular measurement can improve load factors and reduce electricity cost, smarter grids for electricity distribution improve the resiliency of power networks. Additionally, smarter transportation, agriculture, and services can be possible by backing every decision with data collection and analytics.
This considered, the benefits building information modeling (BIM) offers at the various stage are proven. ¨It can play a significant role to make smart cities a success,¨ affirms Sonali Dhopte, Director, Excelize. She highlights some goals for BIM adoption or implementation in smart cities:
- At the design stage: Visualisation of the project leads to a reduction in coordination time; reduction in time by design changes; accuracy in data used for construction as BIM lets us build virtually before building physically.
- At construction stage: Reduction in rework at site owing to clash detection and resolution; the accuracy of Bill of Quantities (BOQ) and consequently material procurement; delay monitoring through 4D construction simulation; availability of an as-built model for facility management.
- At maintenance stage: Integration of design data with maintenance data; the impact of any updates or renovations can be assessed against the data available in the BIM model.
Read the entire article here: “THE SMART CITIES CHALLENGE”
Brief about Ar. Sonali Dhopte:
Architect and Interior Designer since 1993, Sonali has worked with the top architectural firms in the US and India. As Technical Director at Excelize (www.excelize.com), she oversees and guides the BIM technology team and manages project deliveries as per client requirements. As a leading woman Architect, Sonali is a nationally recognized BIM Expert and has presented and participated in various panel discussions in prestigious conferences and has published various articles on BIM in prestigious journals.