Enabling secure and collaborative document sharing in BIM processes

During the lifecycle of construction projects, documents and resources should be shared by partners in a collaborative and secure way. Starting from the Building Information Modelling (BIM) paradigm, we propose the Smart BIM Folder (SBF), a cloud-oriented framework enabling project teams to share construction documents on collaborative nodes, respecting security requirements of documents sharing. The core idea is to consider the SBF as a single, collectively-operated virtual resource accessed via a cloud-based catalogue. The paper proposes mechanisms for document sharing respecting both the typicality of BIM projects and security requirements of stakeholders in such sharing. We discuss cloud architecture issues related to the implementation of the SBF as a cloud service.