Delegates at next week’s international BuildingSMART summit will hear updates on the progress of three “laboratory” trials of various aspects of the Level 2 BIM landscape, put to the test by leading contractors, designers and clients.
Members of the BuildingSMART UK user group are trialling mechanisms to transfer COBie data to asset management systems, working towards a new “template” to assist clients in drawing up Employer’s Information Requirements (EIR), and examining BIM libraries that allow users to pull BIM object data into models.
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Dave Jellings, a member of the BuildingSMART management committee, explained: “The government has done a remarkable job of getting up and running as quickly as it has, and we now have all the standards out there. But they haven’t been 1) fully adopted or 2) tested robustly. So we’re asking people on the team to test them for robustness and value.
“Selected groups of users can report back – there’s a feedback mechanism to the BIM Task Group, the government and technology developers. So we feel these trials are very important, there’s no one else testing the standards at the sharp end. They’re incredibly valuable and the feedback is sought by all involved,” said Jellings, who is also managing director of Solibiri UK and a visiting professor at Birmingham City University.
The three-day international summit taking place next week at BRE Watford is a twice-yearly event, attended by members of BuildingSMART international working on BIM technology and its application.
It will be followed by a two-day BuildingSMART conference, BIM Prospects, to be held at the RIBA on 26-27 March.
The EIR trial, led by UK BuildingSMART technical coordinator Nick Nisbet, is developing a template for EIR which will allow information requirements to be defined in a way that is aligned with UK and international standards including IFC, COBie and the BSI 1192 standards.
The template will ensure that the client or customer can answer simple multiple choice questions about what they require and what their purposes are, without writing their suppliers’ execution plans for them.
The group aims to draft a model template and then invite member companies of the user group to review and test it. A final template will then be produced, together with a report and guidance notes.
Gary Scott, a BIM data specialist at Skanska, is leading a trial to test and evaluate the usability of “intelligent objects” currently available in five different commercial BIM libraries. The level of information varies from library to library, yet it needs to be consistent as suppliers in a construction project complete COBie spreadsheets.
The trial will provide sample IFC models based on the individual objects and COBie spreadsheets for each object evaluated, together with a report and guidance notes for users and providers of object libraries.
The third trial, led by Jeff Stephens, BIM strategy manager for Vinci Construction UK, is looking at using COBie to document data so that it can be handed over to the building’s operator, and to what extent FM and asset management systems can import and export COBie data.
Three well-established FM systems will be part of the trial: Causeway FM, Concept Evolution (used by Skanska) and IBM Maximo (used by Vinci Facilities and Gatwick Airport).
At the end of the trial, a report and guidance notes will be produced for users and providers of asset management systems.
The government has done a remarkable job of getting up and running as quickly as it has, and we now have all the standards out there. But they haven’t been 1) fully adopted or 2) tested robustly. So we’re asking people on the team to test them for robustness and value.
– Dave Jellings, BuildingSMART
