D3 City project — Economic impact of BIM-assisted design validation

This paper reports a return-on-investment (ROI) case study of the use of building information modeling (BIM) in “design validation” based on the avoidance costs of rework due to design errors. The ROI was analyzed using the 709 individual design errors found during the BIM design validation of the six high- and medium-rise buildings in the D3 City project in Seoul, Korea. Each design error was categorized according to its cause and the likelihood of detecting it before construction. The likelihood of detecting errors in the ROI analysis made a large difference of a factor of four to fifteen. An additional analysis on the potential impact of design errors on the schedule shows that costs associated with schedule delays has a much larger economic impact than rework costs.