Determination of 4D-BIM software features and their significances

Building Information Modeling is at the forefront of the innovations spreading rapidly in the construction industry and providing significant benefits and advantages in the field of project management. The number of studies on the adoption of BIM is increasing day by day; however, the number of applications and academic studies on 4D-BIM, which is a combination of time data and 3D-Mmodel, are insufficient. This thesis aims to reveal the 4D-BIM features. Planning is one of the advances in BIM that allows practitioners to visualize the relationship of time to 3D objects. Despite its existing usage, awareness of BIM practitioners regarding 4D-BIM features is not sufficient. Therefore, this study aims to describe 4D-BIM features and determine their importance in the construction industry. Hence, 4D-BIM features were identified through an in-depth literature review and a focus group discussion (FGD) with 10 experts. Consequently, 16 4D-BIM features were determined. Then, these features were evaluated by 35 experts with experience in 4D-BIM, and the data were analyzed with the relative importance index (RII) method to determine the significance levels of the 4D-BIM features. As a result, the importance level of each feature was found to be more than 0.5 according to the RII method, indicating that each of them in 4D-BIM is of critical importance in planning the project. It is believed that this study will pave the way for future studies on 4D-BIM and increase the awareness of practitioners, software developers and researchers in terms of the current needs of the construction industry.