Building Your Own Urban Tool Kit Utilizing parametric BIM components as smart early design tools for large-scale urban planning

The paper describes the development of a set of smart BIM components to facilitate and accelerate the creation of large-scale urban models in the early design phase in a BIM software environment. The components leverage the analytical, parametric and modelling capabilities of the BIM environment to support adaptive parameter-driven building geometry, patterning of different building types, early numerical and graphical design evaluation, various simulation methods and the exploration of design alternatives. The toolset consists of the most common building shapes, but can be extended with additional shapes and their respective area and volumetric calculations when necessary. The rapid large-scale deployment of the components has been achieved by diverting existing tools from their intended use.