Structural engineers have become very familiar with building information modeling (BIM). BIM is the topic of frequent articles and conference presentations. Generally speaking, the structural engineering profession has gravitated toward a common definition of BIM and the term has fully penetrated the industry.

In May 2006, Structural Engineer conducted an online survey of subscribers to determine the awareness, understanding, and use of BIM within the structural engineering industry. The results of that survey were published in the September 2006 issue of Structural Engineer; available at www.gostructural.com/bim. The upshot of that survey was that few structural engineers were familiar with the term (29 percent of respondents to that May 2006 survey) and even fewer of them (23 percent) had used BIM on any project in their firm or organization.

Many of the same questions from that 2006 study were included in the recent 2009 State of the Industry survey conducted in March 2009 to determine what has changed regarding BIM awareness, use, and extent for structural engineers.

Current BIM use
Nearly all of the respondents to the March 2009 survey indicated that they were familiar with BIM (97 percent). This is a tremendous gain from the 29 percent who were familiar with the term three years ago; see Figure 1.

Additionally, this year’s respondents reported that 44 percent have used BIM on a project, as opposed to only 23 percent in 2006; see Figure 2.

Digging a bit deeper, few firms are using BIM on all projects (2 percent), but 27 percent of respondents indicated their firms do use BIM, but on less than 10 percent of all projects. Still, 41 percent of respondents report that their firms do not use BIM at all; see Figure 3.

Future BIM use
We asked more of the same questions in 2009 about industry-wide use of BIM, so we could compare responses from 2006. Figure 4 shows that respondents still project that 50 percent of the AEC industry will be using BIM on a regular basis in the next 5 to 10 years (38 percent). While that is the same timeframe reported by the majority of the 2006 respondents (43 percent), you can see that the curve has pushed down slightly—that 29 percent of 2009 respondents predict the change within the next five years, as compared with 25 percent of the 2006 respondents—but the trend remains the same.

Figure 5 shows the responses for a prediction of 90 percent of the AEC industry using BIM. Again, the curve indicates that respondents believe that adoption will happen sooner than they did three years ago in the 2006 survey.

Integrated project delivery
We included questions about integrated project delivery (IPD) in the 2009 survey to gauge where structural engineers are in their understanding and use of the method. Figure 1 shows that 60 percent of the respondents are familiar with IPD. Figure 6 shows that although more than half of the respondents (54 percent) have not used IPD on a project, 20 percent have used it. This is approximately the percentage of use for BIM in 2006 (23 percent; see Figure 2).

Again we asked respondents to predict the widespread use of IPD; the results are shown in Figure 7. The data indicates that the majority of respondents (43 percent) anticipate that widespread adoption of IPD between five and 10 years from now. Interestingly, 89 percent of respondents believe that within 15 years, most of the AEC industry will be using IPD.

Figure 7 also plots the responses for widespread BIM use for comparison. The data shows a slightly earlier adoption rate for BIM than IPD, as would be expected.

Conclusion
Interpreting the data from the 2009 survey, as well as comparing it with data from the 2006 survey, we can conclude that an understanding and awareness of BIM has indeed permeated the structural engineering profession. While not all firms are leveraging the technology currently, most respondents believe that BIM use will penetrate the AEC industry as a whole within 10 years.

Structural engineers are also quickly coming up to speed on IPD and starting to employ this method on their projects. It is apparent that as BIM adoption increases, IPD will soon follow.