The Influence of BIM Education Improvement on Raising BIM Awareness in Croatia and Slovakia

Abstract

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is an intelligent 3D model-based process that enhances productivity and management performance of construction projects. Recognizing many benefits of BIM, governments of the most developed members of the European Union encourage BIM usage which results in a higher BIM awareness and BIM adoption. These facts suggest that BIM is becoming the norm within construction industry. On the contrary, Croatia and Slovakia have been very low in BIM application and have done little to support BIM initiatives. Previous studies suggested several strategies to increase the BIM application, where providing BIM education at university level is one of them, so universities need to update their curricula accordingly. In this study we compared implemented Construction Management (CM) BIM education on master’s study at the Faculty of Civil Engineering Košice and Zagreb. The results show that BIM education at the both faculties should be connected with other departments on the same faculty, other disciplines but also with real companies and projects. Such extension will provide civil engineers with wider BIM knowledge related to interoperability, integration, communication, collaboration, standardization and clash detection. Thus, BIM education improvement will have good impact on rising BIM awareness and will be good incentive for further BIM implementation in Croatia and Slovakia. This study is an extension of paper presented on Creative Construction Conference 2018 in Ljubljana. In this paper we showed deeper statistical analysis of CM educational programs in Croatia and Slovakia as well as relationship between BIM awareness and BIM education in both countries.