BIM: An Introduction

BIM Guide History and Status

The Guide was developed through a detailed research process and is available at no cost at the http://bim.psu.edu website.  This website is maintained by the Computer Integrated Construction Research Program at Penn State, and includes a number of different guides related to BIM.  Two versions of the guide can be referenced on the website: most people are familiar with Version 2.1 which was published in 2012, but a newer Version 2.2 was recently released in July 2019 as an online version similar to Version 2.1 with some slight modifications. The working draft of Version 3 is publicly available online, though it has not been broadly advertised as a number of important improvements are still in progress. Version 3 revises the planning procedure from a 4 step procedure to a 5 step procedure (separating the definitions of goals from the selection of BIM Uses — previously a single step). Version 3 also includes a revised list of BIM Uses, although the current draft may still have some inconsistencies in their definitions, which will continue to be updated in the coming months. 

Please read through the entire BIM Project Execution Planning Guide (Version 3) so that you are familiar with the content within the Guide. These sections outline the overall planning process, along with the contents for a high-quality BIM Execution Plan (BEP).  Please be aware that you may see the following acronyms in other text:  BIM PxP, BIM PEP, BIMEx, or even BxP.  The terminology of BEP for BIM Execution Plan is the acronym embedded within many of the international BIM standardization initiatives, and will hopefully get adopted within the NBIMS-US^TM when the future version is released.