A 2014 study of 172 completed buildings in Dubai found that 53% exhibited mismatches between their final construction drawings and the building actually delivered, classified into four categories (external elevation changes, internal changes, specification changes, and missed items) with subjective significance scores, and attributed the problem to financial issues, owner-initiated changes, contractor inexperience, and design complexity. Dubai Municipality is reported to have introduced a mandatory BIM (Building Information Modeling) regime for large building projects around November 2013, so this baseline captures a pre-mandate building stock. The open problem is the never-performed empirical evaluation of whether mandatory BIM has eliminated, reduced, or left intact the documented mismatch problem: re-measuring mismatch prevalence, categories, and significance in Dubai buildings permitted under the mandate and comparing against the 2014 baseline, complemented by quantifying which mismatch causes BIM actually removes and by the local cost, time, and safety impact quantification the 2014 study lacked.

Background

In construction, the final (design) drawings are the issued-for-construction documents, while as-built drawings (also called record drawings) are the drawings revised during and after construction to reflect what was actually built. As-built documentation is the primary information source for operation, maintenance, renovation, and legal compliance after handover. A mismatch here means a discrepancy between what the final drawings show and the physical building as delivered — a relocated door, a changed pipe diameter, a missing vent pipe — so the record drawings misrepresent the asset.

Accurate as-built records are a long-standing concern: verification studies in other regions (e.g., reliance on cost figures such as the widely cited US interoperability cost estimates) link inaccurate facility documentation to rework cost, maintenance delays, and worker-safety incidents, and prior technical work has developed verification tools such as laser-scan-based checking of as-built BIM models. What had not existed for Dubai was a systematic measurement of the problem. Shamkhi and Al-Hajj (2014) provided that baseline: analyzing Dubai Municipality final-inspection technical reports for 172 buildings (villas, multi-storey, and industrial), they found 53% of the buildings exhibited mismatches between final drawings and the as-built project, classified the mismatches into four categories — changes in external elevations, changes inside buildings (doors, partitions, floor levels), changes in specifications (pipe diameters, manhole cover types), and missed items (cleanouts, vent pipes, floor traps) — and assigned subjective significance scores from impact on cost, time, and safety (inside-building changes and missed items highest at 3.5, specifications 2, elevations 1). They reported frequency patterns by built area and building height, named the causes (financial issues, owner desire, lack of contractor experience, complexity of design) without quantifying them, and asserted cost, delay, and safety impacts qualitatively, citing evidence from other regions rather than Dubai data.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) — the process of creating and using shared digital 3D object models carrying engineering information through design, construction, and handover — is widely promoted as the remedy for exactly this documentation failure, because the model is intended to be updated as the building is built and handed over as a structured digital record. Dubai Municipality is reported to have introduced a mandatory BIM requirement for large building projects around November 2013, so the 2014 baseline of 172 buildings is a pre-mandate comparison point. The mandate attaches at the building-permit application rather than at completion date, and it applies only to defined building categories and sizes: Dubai Municipality's published BIM circulars (e.g., Circular 9-1-1 of 2021) enumerate the covered categories — buildings above defined floor- and area-thresholds, large complexes, specialized facilities such as hospitals and universities, and governmental projects — with later circulars extending coverage, while the text of the original November 2013 circular and of its 2015 update is no longer published in the municipality's circular index. Since then, the surrounding literature has developed BIM-based tools for managing as-designed/as-built mismatches (Jafari et al. 2020), demonstrated BIM's value in detecting design-versus-constructed conflicts (Abd and Khamees 2017), and surveyed UAE BIM adoption and its barriers (Mehran 2016; Abdalla et al. 2023). Notably, Abdalla et al. (2023), from 15 UAE case studies and interviews with seven UAE BIM experts, report that there is still no enforceable industry-wide BIM standard in the UAE, that municipal BIM submissions are frequently not audited for model content, and that as-built handover still commonly requires physical paper document boxes. None of this literature, however, has ever re-measured the mismatch problem itself in the mandate era — the empirical question the 2014 baseline makes precise and answerable.

Problem Statement

Determine, with empirical evidence from Dubai buildings exposed to the mandatory BIM regime that Dubai Municipality is reported to have introduced around November 2013 for large building projects, what happened to the final-drawing/as-built mismatch problem documented by Shamkhi and Al-Hajj (2014). Because the mandate attaches at the building-permit application stage and covers only defined building categories and sizes, the treated cohort consists of the buildings whose permit applications fell under the BIM requirement in force at the time of application; since the text of the November 2013 circular and of its 2015 update is not published in the municipality's circular index, both the mandate start date and the category and size thresholds applicable at a given application date must be established from verifiable sources and recorded as a documented limitation rather than assumed.

The scientific objective is a defensible empirical verdict — eliminated, reduced, unchanged, or transformed in composition — on the mismatch problem in the mandate-exposed building stock, measured against the 2014 baseline. Establishing that verdict requires re-measuring mismatch prevalence, category distribution (external elevations, internal changes, specification changes, missed items), and significance for the mandate-exposed cohort, using a sampling frame and category definitions whose comparability with the 2014 study of 172 buildings is documented and defended to the extent the 2014 instrument can be reconstructed — with an explicit account of any residual non-comparability where it cannot — so that the results can be meaningfully compared with its 53% prevalence figure, category frequencies, and significance scores. Because the mandate covers only larger projects while the 2014 baseline aggregates villas, multi-storey, and industrial buildings, the comparison with the 53% figure must be made within matched building categories or must explicitly account for the composition difference between the treated cohort and the baseline frame; non-mandated categories such as villas serve as untreated comparison strata rather than being counted as treated buildings. Where the primary Dubai records needed for direct re-measurement cannot be accessed, the objective is met by the strongest defensible assessment the available evidence supports, provided it states its data limitations and specifies the sampling frame, comparability basis, and records needed for direct verification; a direct re-measurement remains the standard where those records can be obtained.

Complementary to that verdict, and strengthening but not individually required for it, are two further analyses: quantifying the relative contributions of the causes the 2014 study only named — financial issues, owner-initiated changes, contractor inexperience, design complexity — testing rather than assuming which mismatch sources BIM workflows actually remove (for example, whether coordination, documentation, and verification failures decline while owner-driven late changes persist); and quantifying, with local Dubai project data, the cost, time, and safety impacts of the residual mismatches that the 2014 study could only assert qualitatively from other regions' literature. Together with the re-measured prevalence and composition, these would give Dubai's regulators and facility managers the quantified residual picture — what remains, why, and at what impact — needed to decide whether current mandate enforcement and handover auditing are sufficient.

References

  1. Shamkhi, M. F.; Al-Hajj, A. (2014). Assessing the Significance of Mismatching in Buildings' Final Drawings in Dubai Projects. Computing in Civil and Building Engineering (2014), Proc. 2014 International Conference on Computing in Civil and Building Engineering, ASCE, pp. 1538–1545. DOI: 10.1061/9780784413616.191. https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784413616.191
  2. Gharouni Jafari, Kobra; Ghazi Sharyatpanahi, Nozhat Sadat; Noorzai, Esmatullah (2020). BIM-based integrated solution for analysis and management of mismatches during construction. Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology 19(1):81–102. DOI: 10.1108/jedt-02-2020-0044. https://doi.org/10.1108/jedt-02-2020-0044
  3. Abdalla, Salem Buhashima; Rashid, Mamun; Yahia, Moohammed Wasim; Mushtaha, Emad; Opoku, Alex; Sukkar, Ahmad; Maksoud, Aref; Hamad, Rawan (2023). Comparative Analysis of Building Information Modeling (BIM) Patterns and Trends in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with Developed Countries. Buildings 13(3):695. DOI: 10.3390/buildings13030695. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings13030695
  4. Abd, Abbas M.; Khamees, Alaa S. (2017). As built case studies for BIM as conflicts detection and documentation tool. Cogent Engineering 4(1):1411865. DOI: 10.1080/23311916.2017.1411865. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311916.2017.1411865
  5. Mehran, Donya (2016). Exploring the Adoption of BIM in the UAE Construction Industry for AEC Firms. Procedia Engineering 145:1110–1118. DOI: 10.1016/j.proeng.2016.04.144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.proeng.2016.04.144
  6. Dubai Municipality (2021). Circular No (9-1-1) of Year 2021: On Application of Buildings Information Modelling. https://dmpmedia.dm.gov.ae/uploads/2024/11/9-1-1-Application-of-Buildings-Information-Modelling.pdf
  7. Dubai Municipality (2026). Circular No 9-1-3 of 2026: On expanding the mandatory submission of Building Information Models (BIM Models) with the building permit application for certain types of buildings. https://dmpmedia.dm.gov.ae/uploads/2026/02/Circular-9-1-3.pdf
  8. Dubai Municipality. Building & Planning Circulars index. https://www.dm.gov.ae/building-planning-circulars-2/