BIM Technology Application to Propagate the Knowledge and Information for Design Changes and Modifications Throughout the Product Development Cycle

A design change may be considered a modification in a particular aspect of this design which has already been released and delivered (production phase) or even during its conception and development phase. Depending on the complexity and stage in the life cycle of the product where the change process is triggered, these changes may take from a few hours to several months to re-adapt the referred design. By applying concepts such as Parallelism, Concurrent Engineering, or most recently, Digital Manufacturing, it is imperative to guarantee that the resulting information about design changes is accurately propagated, reaches all involved stakeholders. Regarding Information and Knowledge Management, the emerging of new technologies such as Cloud Computing, Web Services or more specifically BIM (Building Information Modeling) have boosted the integration of all information projects in collaborative online environments. This paper further explores possibilities to use BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology for organizing and collaboration of the information and knowledge that comes with design changes through the entire products’ lifecycle.