Current State and Future of Building Information Modeling for Sustainable Heritage Buildings

Heritage buildings are distinctive landmarks around the world with historical or cultural significance. However, many heritage buildings lack specific guidelines and managerial steps to reduce demolition and dilapidation of buildings and loss of economic and social advantages related to heritage buildings, which become deplorable. Recently, Building Information Modeling (BIM) may have a significant potential to support the management, conservation, design, and maintenance of heritage buildings as a consolidated technique for heritage preservation. Whereas a myriad of research studies have made significant contributions to the general aspects of the management, maintenance, and reconstruction of heritage buildings, it is lacking scientometric analysis to investigate the comprehensive understanding of the present state of applications of BIM within heritage buildings research. The study’s aim is to perform a bibliometric analysis of the existing BIM and heritage buildings literature and to provide a picture of the research status from 2015 to October 2022. There were 186 articles extracted from the Scopus database. “VOSviewer” tool was employed to visualize the literature containing the most active countries, scientific journals, and highly used keywords. Furthermore, the recent studies on the impact of BIM and its implementation in heritage buildings are reviewed. Accordingly, the explanations related to research findings, suggestions for future studies have been provided on the applications of BIM in heritage buildings to attain sustainable heritage development.