Towards commands recommender system in BIM authoring tool using transformers
This work addresses the barrier of BIM adoption in the AEC sector by improving modeling efficiency, though it is incremental as it builds on existing recommendation and transformer methods.
The study tackled the complexity of BIM software by developing a sequential recommendation system to predict the next-best command based on user interactions, using transformer architectures and real-world BIM log data, resulting in a prototype that outperformed previous methods and enhanced design efficiency.
The complexity of BIM software presents significant barriers to the widespread adoption of BIM and model-based design within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector. End-users frequently express concerns regarding the additional effort required to create a sufficiently detailed BIM model when compared with conventional 2D drafting. This study explores the potential of sequential recommendation systems to accelerate the BIM modeling process. By treating BIM software commands as recommendable items, we introduce a novel end-to-end approach that predicts the next-best command based on user historical interactions. Our framework extensively preprocesses real-world, large-scale BIM log data, utilizes the transformer architectures from the latest large language models as the backbone network, and ultimately results in a prototype that provides real-time command suggestions within the BIM authoring tool Vectorworks. Subsequent experiments validated that our proposed model outperforms the previous study, demonstrating the immense potential of the recommendation system in enhancing design efficiency.