A system for monitoring cost and payment with 5D BIM

Abstract

Cost and payment monitoring are claimed as the essential process for project management. Cost and payment monitoring is used for tracking the status of project cost during the construction process. However, the current information of cost and payment in the monitoring practice has to manually check with several documents including drawing, cost data and schedule plans. So the traditional practice has consumed more time with unnecessary works and caused some difficulties in the re-calculation to monitor cost and payment progress. To overcome this problem, this research proposed the system for monitoring cost and payment progress by using building information modelling (BIM), which is referred to 5D BIM. The system could be applied to interchange time and cost information with 3D model. To develop this system, current practices on cost and payment monitoring is explored by interviewing experts about related process and information. With the result of interview, the framework of the cost and payment monitoring system is developed. This system applies visual programming language (Dynamo) to link information between Revit and Excel. In preconstruction stage, the information of cost and schedule plan is defined in Excel. The system is developed by using the visual programming extension to interchange cost and time information with 3D model that interacts date from excel to 3D model. In construction stage, actual progress of cost and payment are collected and stored in Excel and 3D model, the visual programming extension is designed to calculate earn value, cost progress and payment progress in Excel. In addition, the status of delay, over budget and unpaid works can be visualized in a color scheme in 3D model by a visual programming extension. Result shows that the proposed system is able to monitor cost and payment progress with visualization automatically.