Scan to BIM: virtual reconstruction of a historic building using BIM (H-BIM)

Abstract World Heritage is classified into the three groups natural, cultural, and underwater heritage according to what is proclaimed by UNESCO. Cultural heritage includes tangible and intangible cultures (UNESCO, 2020). It has been more than two decades that preservation, visualization, and documentation of architectural heritage, by means of developing digital technologies in architectural science, have been brought to the fore. Nowadays, it has been attempted to save the historical sites by these approaches. Needless to say, inconsistency and disorganization in the data gathered to result in human errors in some parts of the process which would detrimentally impact on the accuracy and cost of the project as well as the time consuming on work. There are different tools and approaches which can facilitate the process. Architecture, engineering, and construction field have been developed to build improved structures through BIM technology; therefore, it assists them to preserve the cultural and historical heritage. Historical building information management (HBIM) is a new approach that is spreading into intricate modelling of historical heritage by the use of BIM in the context of its documentation, perception, reconstruction and maintenance of buildings. This modern technology enables the analysis of information through BIM for data assimilation of the remained technical reports, ancient manuscripts, old archived maps, ground and aerial laser scans and photogrammetry in order to design a tangible model of the building to be utilized in different fields as in facility management (FM), virtualization and future technologies. The aim of this research is threefold; firstly, it attempts to specify the definitions in the context of HBIM; secondly, it attempts to analyze the various concepts in the context of novel methods of maintenance and documentation of historical buildings. Finally, by drawing on the parallel studies in the similar contexts, and the technological apparatuses which discussed earlier, it is aiming to reach at a methodology with enhanced quality and certitude for model building with precise details. This thesis is studying the museum building of Berlin Naturkundemuseum, which has been modelled and documented with a Trimble TX8 laser scanner. In the end, the results of this study, along with other parallel studies, will be presented, and then the limitations, as well as the future perspective of the study, will be discussed. It is also important to mention that the final results of the case study will be saved in *.RVT, *. E57, *.LAS and IFC formats in order to be used for further studies, maintenance, renovation and documentation of the building. Keywords: BIM, building information modelling, Facility management, laser scanning, point cloud data, Historical building information management (HBIM), As-built