As noted by the moderator of the discussion Tatiana Kovalenko, Chair of the AEB Real Estate Committee and Chair of the Industrial Construction Committee of the AIP of Russia, BIM now refers to innovations that are much talked about, but just a few understand how to use it properly and to the full extent in practice. BIM is much broader than design, which is currently in the focus of its application: it is a technology that affects the entire life cycle of the project, including the maintenance of the facility.

Kamil Karibov, Partner at Beiten Burkhardt Russia, presented a report on legal aspects of BIM-technology implementation and emphasized the need to adapt the existing legal concepts and work through a number of issues ("legal BIM"), in particular, the need for changes in legislation, insurance and contract drafting. Ultimately, if BIM-technologies are widely used at a sufficiently high level, they will reduce the conflict potential of the construction industry.

Anastasia Semenchenko, Deputy Chairman of the Real Estate and Construction Committee of CCI France Russie and co-founder of M.K.3 Design Bureau, spoke about her work experience in a common data environment (CDE) based on Autodesk BIM360 cloud solutions. Anastasia noted that working in CDE enables to save time and resources to create a well-coordinated full-scale model. BIM360 structure includes statistics and analytics, information and document flow, mechanisms of interaction between the participants of the design process, project management capabilities for different participants and for different modules of the project, as well as the administration of the account. The customer and the designer have a choice of models of interaction in CDE, each of which has its own advantages and limitations.

Evgeny Lyashok, Project Director of ATP TLP Architects and Engineers, shared his practical experience in BIM design of a dairy plant in the Novosibirsk region with a total area of over 100 sq.m. Evgeny highlighted that BIM makes it possible to build a detailed visualized model already at the concept development stage (thanks to which one can immediately give a preliminary cost estimate) and then constantly keep the architectural and engineering components of the project connected, thereby ensuring design quality control.

Maxim Kolbyshev, Head of the Technical group of Saint-Gobain, presented the ways of using BIM by construction materials manufacturers - in particular, for selecting technological solutions for a specific object and their visualization. Maxim talked on the use of PIM (Product Information Management) - a universal digital product catalogue available from any device and allowing to quickly navigate through the products and select the optimal solutions for a particular object with detailed visualization. As the speaker noted, forming such a common database at the national level would greatly contribute to the development of information technologies in design and construction.

Irina Voloshina, Head of the design team of Uponor Rus, spoke about one of the aspects of facility design - creating surface heating systems in the BIM environment and about the plug-in developed by Uponor Rus for this purpose. The advantages of the software used by the company include, in particular, the ability to generate highly detailed images while keeping the file size small. The visualization powers of the software allow the use of virtual reality helmets for the best presentation of the design results. In general, as the speaker noted, the key value of the BIM environment is its integration capabilities, which provide for building management from the design stage to maintenance.

Nikita Pospelov, BIM Manager at Severin Development, talked in detail about the benefits of the BIM environment during the construction phase of the project. Nikita told about the application of information technology in this process step by step: from the audit of incoming documents (its verification, submission of comments, monitoring their elimination, checking the BIM model and drawings, etc.) with the following control over the progress of the building construction: in terms of volumes, timing, costs, quality assurance and safety engineering, with the ability to display the geodetic survey, laser scanning and photogrammetry on the model; and ending with final reports and forecasts.

When all the presentations were over, all the participants of the meeting raised questions to the speakers and actively shared their own experience of using BIM-technologies.