Shizhong district in Jinan, capital of Shandong province has been ramping up efforts to nurture distinctive industry clusters in order to boost regional economic development.

A heat source plant building information model is undergoing final debugging at a factory in Shizhong district. With this model, the operating status and parameters of each system in the plant can be seen and controlled in real time, which will greatly improve the operating efficiency.

According to Chen Jiayuan, general manager of Jinan BIM Modeling SoftTech Co, the company's products have filled the gap of the BIM (building information model) industry lacking basic software, which will also drive the secondary development and utilization of downstream software developers, and fuel the development of the current BIM professional application software market that is worth more than 200 billion yuan ($31.66 billion).

In recent years, Shizhong district has made great efforts to foster the BIM industry and other digital economies, and also established the BIM industry alliance. The alliance consists of more than 20 universities and research institutes such as Shandong University and more than 50 leading enterprises.

There are more than 7,800 enterprises engaged in the digital economy in Shizhong district. The district has been approved by the Shandong provincial government to build a characteristic industrial cluster based on the digital economy.