The interface between construction and production is an area of research with rising importance given its increasing demand for efficiency gains in factory planning and construction planning processes. In fact, nowadays, it is usual for production and surrounding buildings to be planned separately as independent entities. According to the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering of RWTH Aachen University, it is against this background that recent factory planning projects have reported cost increases and time delays due to non-transparent information between different planners. Building Information Modelling (BIM) addresses precisely this problem. However, BIM is barely used in projects for production planning of factories. This is critical since factory planning has to deal with more complex planning parameters (due to the technical building equipment) compared to private housing construction or public building construction, where BIM is already being applied increasingly. In order to close this gap, it is first of all important to create transparency within the individual information interfaces between production planning and building planning. This article addresses this issue and identifies major obstacles in interdisciplinary cooperation between building planners and production planners. For this purpose, an interdisciplinary and partially standardised study has been carried out using questionnaires and partly-open expert interviews. The results show scarce implementation in factory planning projects due to (1) missing maturity level specifications and (2) missing data management standards. Both theoretical and practical implications of this study as well as limitations and future directions for research are discussed.

Many industrial sectors are currently being challenged with regard to the flexibility and adaptability of their production and control processes, which can, inter alia, be attributed to macroeconomic trends such as digitisation. These trends not only shorten product lifecycles but also lead to a greater need for redesign and transformation of production systems within factories. Since this field of factory planning tends to play a subordinate role in SMEs anyway, the above-mentioned factors impede an efficient execution of corresponding projects even more. While large companies are more likely to have a factory planning department, SMEs often do not have sufficient resources to meet the aforementioned challenges through independent factory planning projects. Although network-based structures could be a realistic and practical way to meet the challenges of factory planning as they generally provide possibilities for resource and risk sharing, SMEs often manifest resentments towards network collaborations. This paper aims to validate these resentments. For this purpose, a profound expert study explores whether network cooperations could overcome companies' challenges. It derives implications towards a model that enables network cooperations in factory planning.

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Factory design involves the design of a complex production system in coherence with the requirements of the surrounding building envelope. These two disciplines, however, are still not integrated in order to be able to perform a completely BIM-based factory design that can be used to minimise design-related delays and reduce the cost of a factory design project. Main obstacles are unaligned levels of development, lack of transparency of informational relations and inefficient collaboration between production design and MEP(H) design. The objective of this paper is hence the generation and discussion of two concrete solution recommendations through an explorative expert study to overcome the already identified obstacles hindering an efficient BIM-based factory design process.

Die Planungsmethode des Building Information Modeling (BIM) findet vermehrt in Bauprojekten Anwendung. Bei der Fabrikplanung wird die Produktionsplanung jedoch oftmals nicht integriert mit der Gebäudeplanung geplant. Dies führt häufig zu Kostensteigerungen und Zeitverzögerungen aufgrund intransparenter Informationen und Abstimmungsschwierigkeiten im Planungsprozess. Dieser Beitrag zeigt Anforderungen an eine integrierte Produktions- und Gebäudeplanung im Sinne eines Fabrikinformationsmodells und leitet entsprechende Handlungsempfehlungen ab.   The planning method of Building Information Modeling (BIM) is being increasingly used in construction projects. In factory planning, however, production system and buildings are often not planned in an integrated way. This often leads to cost increases and time delays due to information and coordination problems in the planning process. This article shows what integrated production and building planning requires in terms of a factory information model, deriving appropriate recommendations for action.