The Study of the Contracts of Building Information Model (BIM) and the Approach to its Contractual Framework Codification

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been created to increase the efficiency and use the abilities of the digital tools in construction projects and is improving more and more. In addition to the benefits of this technology, some new challenges have been rosed most of which are related to legal and contractual issues. The routine contracts of the construction industry cannot respond well to the special situation of BIM, and various approaches have been proposed at the international level to resolve this problem. Some of them are under investigation and research to reach an appropriate solution. A specific contractual framework has not been codified in Iran, either. The study of these approaches fulfilled separately and scattered all over the world is a necessity that must be analyzed to present an explicit viewpoint for the decision-makers to achieve an appropriate approach for BIM contractual framework codification. This study investigates 21 cases of the proposed approaches in 7 leading countries in this field (BIM) and receiving the domestic industrial professionals’ comments, has compared these approaches and categorized their advantages and disadvantages. The results of this research showed that providing “the contractual appendix of BIM” and its attachment to the existed contracts can be an acceptable approach for removing the contractual problems of BIM. In the end, some proposals were presented for the manner of an appropriate contractual framework along with the country's situation and requirements.