Management of High-Volume Clashes During Clash Detection

Typically in construction projects, design drawings are usually developed by different trade teams like architectural, structural, and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing and fire-fighting (MEPF). Hence, when these drawings are integrated it results in clashes between various trade-specific components. Conventionally clashes are found by overlapping the drawings and resolved by manually coordinating between the different departments which is a chaotic and time-consuming process. The efficiency of this process is low and can even lead to conflicts between different departments. These clashes if not resolved before the construction lead to reworks on-site which results in time and cost overruns. This problem can be effectively overcome by using Building Information Modelling’s (BIM) Clash Detection (CD) application, which identifies clashes from the 3D building models by integrating them. A Clash detection test usually identifies a large number of relevant and non-relevant clashes. Amongst these, the relevant clashes need to be resolved before construction to avoid rework and idle time during construction and the non-relevant clashes can be dealt with in site during construction. For resolving the relevant clashes, they have to be notified to different departments. Due to their large volume and multiple stakeholders involved, many challenges are faced by BIM manager and hence scientific management of clashes is crucial for better segregation and streamlining. In this study, a method of codifying clashes is presented for effective and efficient management of clashes and to eradicate issues associated with it. The developed method was applied to a sample project to validate.