  Among different phases of the life cycle of a building or facility, design is
of the utmost importance to ensure safety, efficiency and sustainability of the
building or facility. How to control and improve design quality and efficiency
has been explored for years, and more studies emerged with the popularization
of Building Information Modelling (BIM). However, most of them focused on the
extraction of design behaviors, while paying less attention to how a design is
formed. Therefore, this study proposes an approach to tracking and replaying
the BIM-based design process by integrating data logging and 4D visualization
techniques. First of all, potential design behaviors and procedures are
analyzed and extracted by observing how a designer designs a BIM model.
Meanwhile, the required data for logging design process is defined and a
relevant method to collect these data is developed based on the APIs of BIM
software. Then, strategies on how to visualize different design procedures are
designed and implemented via 4D visualization. Finally, a prototype system is
developed based on Autodesk Revit and validated through a case study. Result
shows that the proposed approach enables intuitively and interactively review
of the design process, and makes it easier to understand design behaviors and
even identify potential pitfalls, thus improving the design efficiency and
quality.
