BUILDING TO CITY: INTEGRATING BIM INTO CIM FOR A COMPREHENSIVE DIGITAL URBANISM
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21837/pm.v24i41.2017Keywords:
Building Information Modeling (BIM), City Information Modeling (CIM), Digital Urbanism, Urban Digital Twins, Semantic Interoperability, Multi-scale Modeling, Smart CitiesAbstract
The transformation from Building Information Modeling (BIM) to City Information Modeling (CIM) poses a major challenge for achieving holistic digital urbanism. While BIM delivers object-based, detailed models of individual structures, scalability and semantic structure always fail when multiplied and transferred in scale and complexity for urban systems. This paper addresses BIM integration in CIM for the construction of a multi-scale, semantically interoperable urban digital twin platform. In a comparative analysis of early pioneers of digital twins – namely Virtual Singapore, Helsinki 3D City and Dubai Digital Twin – our research identifies best practices and common pitfalls related to data standardization, semantic mismatches and computational scalability. Considerable attention has been given to semantic interoperability as a crucial condition for effective data translation at different scaled levels from micro (building scale) to macro (city scale) models. The paper derives a BIM-to-CIM integration framework based on case-based Modeling that demonstrates how individual BIM models constructively inform broader-based CIM platforms for long-term sustainable district planning and management. platforms for long-term sustainable district planning and management. The resulting framework facilitates robust data-driven urban planning and unlocks interoperability between separate modeling spaces, establishing a stable foundation for potential smart city use cases.
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