Open standards for increased business benefits in construction

The cross-disciplinary seminar on open standards for increased business benefits was held last Thursday in KTH following an introductory course on standards for BIM. The course and the seminar were organized by the Swedish non-profit organization BIM Alliance which was grounded in 2014 through merging OpenBIM, Förvaltningsinformation and buildingSMART Sweden. The aim was to unifying all effort for promoting seamless flow of information in the AEC industry.

The morning session was opened by Jan Byfors, CTO at NCC and chiarman of the board of the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS). He addressd the importance of standards for effectivity, the substantial contribution of Sweden to development of international standards and the close collaoration of SIS with the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and its international equivalent, ISO.

Kurt Löwnertz from Sweco presented an overview of the three major domains of BIM standards i.e. concepts, processes and technology. BuildingSMART had previously defined these as trems, process and data. Kurt also emphassized how fundamental the notion of 'communication' is to the three domains and their corresponding industry standards i.e. IFC, IDM, bsDD, BCF, CoClass, fi2, OmniClass, etc. Väino Tarandi from KTH briefly yet thoroughly explained the overall structure of the vendor-neutral building information schema, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). IFC models could be produced and transferred in different formats e.g. the STEP physical file format (the .ifc extension) and XML. The hardcoded and hierarchical organization of building data in IFC models underpins accurate data transfer across proprietary applications and deters the need for tedious and inacurate enquieries.

Klas Eckerberg from Projektengagemang and the Swedish Building Centre (Svensk Byggtjänst) presented the basics of the new Swedish standard for classification in building industry, CoClass. The initiative is based on, and expands, two upcoming international standards: the new version of IEC/ISO 81346-2 and the new veriosn of ISO/IEC 81346-12. CoClass aims to cover the recent needs of the industry for classification that are not met by the current system, BSAB. The most prominent new features in CoClass are bilinguistic terminology (Swedish and English), coverage of the entire lifecycle of buildings and the entire built environment across all spatial scales and disciplines, BIM-compatibility (e.g. mapping to IFC), inclusion of objects and object properties and support for activities. The Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) aims to adopt CoClass by 2018.


Morning session in V-building: Jan-Anders Jönsson presents
the basics of the facility management data transfer format fi2.

Jan-Anders Jönsson and Per Erlandsson talked about fi2, the XML-based standard for facility management information and its associated features such as fi2-messages (fi2meddelande) for different functionalities e.g. energy calculation. fi2-messages could be considered as the equivallent of Model View Definitions (MVDs) for design-intent models. With the aim of facilitating data transfer among the diversified systems used by owners, clients and facility managers, a number of web interfaces called fastAPIs have been recently developed by SABO in collaboration with BIM Alliance. Currently, three interfaces are available for facility management systems, access control systems and consumption metering and monitoring systems. The final talk of the morning session before a group excercise and sum-up was held by Kurt Löwnertz. He briefly addressed the Swedish codebook Bygghandlingar 90 (BH90) and its recommendations on building information hand-over requirements, hand-over specifications and documentation of hand-over specification.

Afternoon session in Q-building: Stig Bengtsson from BAU
architects shares his experience of the IFC-viewer app BIMx.

The seminar on open standards held in the afternoon was mainly focused on industry actors and their approach to BIM standards. Representatives from the Swedish Transport Administration and major manufacturers of BIM applications (Autodesk, Graphisoft, Trimble, dRofus, Incit, Vico Office, etc.) held short presentations and shared their thoughta and experiences in the closing panel discussion. According to Peter Nielsen from Incit (one of the top manufacturers of facility management applications in Sweden), FM actor are still concerned with such primary tasks as area calculation and inventory of doors and windows. There is in fact not much demand among FM actors for the more sophisticated capabilities envisioned by BIM such as three-dimensional visualization, optimization of maintenance, support for neutral information formats and informed facility planning - he contended. Yet, they have provided such capacities in the latest versions of their applications.

Peter Nielsen from Incit clarifies his approach to open standards
 for BIM. Manufacturers of facility management systems have
 been traditionally not present in such event.

Evolution and implementation of BIM is constantly gaining momentum. So is the development of the open standards for building information management. A shift of focus from data models to the desired business processes underpinning creation, transfer and effective use of those models is in progess. Integrating scores of sectors and firms scattered across temporal phases (design, construction and FM) and spatial scales (BIM and GIS) are currently the major fronts to conquer. At the same time, the evolving semantic web initiatives claim to be the ultimate solution for decentralized building information management. Whatever the future holds, timely introduction and evolution of standards would converge the diversified efforts and help prioritizing the mutual interests of the society as a whole over those of the individual industry actors.