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.

BIM-boost

As agreed a while ago, today I made a rather concise presentation as part of WSP consulting Group's BIM-boost event held at Visualisation Center in Norrköping. The first part was a brief introduction of Building Information Modeling (BIM), BIM repositories, and the universal concept of open BIM. After the break, definitions and categories of activities within the facility management and operation phase of building were reviewed. Finally, implications, impediments, and empirical examples of informed facility management and operation routines were briefly presented.

As far as I knew, other speakers were more focused either on the status quo of implementation of BIM in the construction market, or detailed instructions on use of specific software. I tried to take a different approach by departing from the literature available on building data modeling and life-cycle perspective on building data management. Yet, each section was rounded up with introducing capabilities of several prominent commercialized solutions in each area. Definitions and common applications of BIM, aggregate data models, BIM repositories, introduction of buildingSMART, IFC (Industry Foundation Classes), facility operations and maintenance, Computerized Maintenance and Management Systems (CMMS), Building Condition Index (BCI) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI), COBie (Construction Operations information exchange), and FM:BIM:BAS loosely coupled constellations were the minor topics covered in my lecture.

Visualisation Center in Norrköping

buildingSMART Data Dictionary

Last November, Nordic buildingSMART's workshop on Data Dictionary was held at KTH, Stockholm. It is perhaps more convenient to provide a summarized background before I proceed to my short report on the major topics discussed during the workshop:

buildingSMART is a neutral, unique and international non profit organization that aims for standardizing building information exchange and thus facilitate the smooth flow of information through the entire life cycle of the building. Data Dictionary is one of the three major components of the buildingSMART's initiative which serves to link existing product and material databases to disciplinary building information models (BIMs). The aim is generating a global IFD (International Framework for Dictionaries) library to be used by all actors around the world.

BuildingSMART data model and and buildingSMART processes are the two other components. The former is best known by the vendor-neutral and object-based building information model, IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) which is based on EXPRESS modelling language and is registered by ISO as ISO/PAS 16739. The latter is often translated as Information Delivery Manual (IDM) and is devised for filtering out portions of a building model for specific contractual situations. IDM is linked to the concept, Model View Definition (MVD) which defines a subset of the IFC schema delineated by certain data exchange requirements.

The dominant theme of the discussions at the workshop was how should problems triggered by trans-sectoral, trans-cultural and linguistic diversities in building industry  be overcome in search of a consistent worldwide standardization practice. Participants did not fully agree on - among others - whether GUIDs (Global Unique Identifiers) of materials, products, etc. suffice or actual names should also be incorporated in building data models.

It was emphasized by attendees that manufacturers and material providers play a momentous role in realization of bsDD. They should thus be motivated and conducted through both encouraging and mandating strategies to provide their product specifications in standard and life-cycle-supporting formats such as EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) and Omniclass instead of commonplace paper or PDF manuals.

Participants believed that IFD is intended to and will be the ultimate solution for overcoming current limitations of IFC. The global data dictionary of tomorrow should be flexible enough to swiftly navigate between different classification systems and cover the wide range of fully generic to very specialized object specifications. BuildingSMART Data Dictionary makes it possible to envision coexistence of radically different representations of the world accessed through simplified API's as well as user-friendly interfaces.

Source:
http://www.buildingsmart.com/

ECPPM 2012

Dinner gathering at Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center in Reykjavik 

Last Wednesday during our weekly lunch seminar at Department of Real Estate and Construction Management (KTH), I made a short report on the 9th European Conference on Product and Process Modeling (ECPPM 2012) that was held 25 - 27th July in Reykjavik (Iceland). This was a brief introduction of four works that I had found to be the most influential and merited among those that were relevant to my field of research.

Of the wide variety of topics and tracks, these sounded to be the closest to what we do here at the Division of Project Communication: modeling, interoperability, collaboration and team working, smart buildings, ICT based products, services and innovative and emerging ICT technologies. The initial session was opened by the President of Iceland's (Dr. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson) speech which addressed among all environmental concerns in building industry and how this can be enhanced by a more widespread and shrewd use of IT technologies such as BIM. Keynote speakers then gave amazing talks mostly focused on challenges around efficient deployment of BIM in construction and interoperability.

Here are my choices:

1) Collaborative engineering with IFC: New insights and technology (by L.A.H.M. van Berlo, J. Beetz, P. Bos, H. Hendriks and R.C.J. van Tongeren) 

The shift in perception of interrelations among domain-specific building models (1998)

This research is mainly developed at TNO and Eindhoven University of Technology and clarifies the authors' new approach to the "model" part of "building information model". The point of departure is the historical change in perception of building models from a network of inter-related discipline-specific models to a "shared data model". The authors suggest that it is again time to clarify that this "shared model" can not contain all information from different domains but is simply a "reference model", an aggregated model" or a so-called "federated model" which is limited in use (only used for functionalities such as checking, analysis and coordination) and can well be communicated through IFC (Industry Foundation Classes).

Authors' suggsted data exchange scenario among building disciplines

The authors have also delineated dichotomies such as little BIM/big BIM and homogeneous software environment/plural data environment.

2) BIM as a centre piece for optimised building operation (by B. Cahill, K. Menzel & D. Flynn)

Researchers at University College Cork in Ireland and their partners have published results of their studies on optimization of open-source BIM for using it in building operation in this project. Their goal is devising a less manual and error-prone data transfer and integrating wired and wireless sensed building data sources. For this purpose, the authors have studied a system composed of ITOBO (Information Technology for Optimized Building Operation), BIMserver (which is produced by authors of the previous article presented here) and Berkley Database.

Data Cube

Their eventual suggestion is integrating the data in a datawarehouse which in turn builds up a Data Cube. This way, the original BIM which has been created and enriched during design and construction phase, can also survive and be constant synchronized with new data and exploited during the rest of the building's life-cycle.

3) Life-cycle building control (by E.W. East, C. Bogen & M. Rashid)

This work by the Engineer Research and Development Center in United States is built over the previous initiative introduced by East: the COBie (Construction Operation Building information exchange). This was aimed at development of open standards for contracted exchange of building information and "describe the content of building asset information deliverables regardless of the low-level format in which that information is transported".

This time, authors introduce LCie (the Life-Cycle information exchange) to also integrate data from design- and construction intent models with inputs from sensors and metering and control systems. The aim is enabling facility managers to easily control their resources in practice as well as creating grounds for an efficient and authentic environmental performance evaluation of the building.

Sensor Fusion Platform

The article is enriched by introduction of basic data transfer requirements i.e. defined "sourcing" and "using" routines and current approaches to evaluation of environmental performance for a better comprehension. Future plans for developing a Sensor Fusion Platform in collaboration with BIMserver and oBIX-based OX Framework have also been outlined.

4) Accessing large 3D BIMs from mobile devices (B.D. Larsen)

This work is an interesting representative of efforts for facilitating non-expert users' access to BIM developed at Dalux (Denmark). The author's suggestion (a web-based application which was also demonstrated in the conference room) is designed for mobile devices and uses cloud servers. 

The aim is making more stakeholder BIM-capable by developing a user-friendly, interoperable and fast device with the fewest number of clicks and menus possible. This tools takes in different formats, uses IFC as internal format and is fully cross-disciplinary and interactive.

PS. At the concluding ceremony, the work by Robert Zach from Vienna University of Technology received the Best PhD Paper prize and Vienna was chosen as the venue for the next ECPPM accasion. During and after the conference, we made wonderful visits to Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center and the Blue Lagoon Geotermal Spa. Iceland is a fantastic country with unique breathtaking landscapes and a small but vibrant and open society.