Grasping why standards are important

Today’s world is built on standards that help people drive innovation and increase productivity. On a more rudimentary level, standardization makes your life easier; think about the standardized units of measurement that you encounter every day or labeled sizes that let you easily choose clothes or shoes.

Think about food labeling, which helps you to clearly understand the nutritional value of food and compare like for like, whether it’s the sodium content of lasagna or the amount of protein in an energy bar. Standards exist where allowing the providers of a service or the manufacturers of an object free reign would result in confusion or chaos.

Start by thinking about what would happen if you didn’t have access to standards:

• Products of poor quality: Items that don’t meet standards may malfunction, break down, or even be unsafe.
• Products that are totally incompatible with others: Imagine if every electrical item in your home had a different proprietary plug or socket design, or if every model of car needed custom tires.
• Every manufacturer’s solution would be unique: The options to compare standard components or their performance and to learn from experience and previous mistakes wouldn’t exist.

Now just replace the references to products and manufacturers with projects and design teams. If you didn’t have access to standards, you’d have

• Project work of poor quality: Construction processes that don’t meet standards may malfunction, break down, or even be unsafe.
• Project work that’s totally incompatible with others: Imagine if every drawing or model in your project used a different proprietary file format, and if you had to buy different software for every single team.
• Every designer’s solution would be unique: The options to compare standard components or their performance and to learn from experience and previous mistakes wouldn’t exist.

Interesting, yes? As you can see, BIM standards are vital.

In previous chapters, we discuss examples of standardization to demonstrate how valuable it can be — from credit cards to aeronautical design. We discuss in this chapter that the construction industry is ready for standardization and look at the documents that aim to equip the industry for a successful collaborative future.

Training the industry to think about open BIM

In today’s digitized world, standards allow people to create, use, and maintain information in a well-organized way. The standards not only encourage best practice, but they also offer a means to achieve real and measurable improvements. Sharing construction information, drawings, specifications, and schedules in an agreed and consistent manner can bring about savings in cost and reduce waste.

In order to achieve this, the members of the project team must be able to work together more effectively than ever before. The following processes are critical to the modern BIM-enabled project team:

• Coordinating project information so that everyone has the most up-to-date version of the accurate and specific information they require for their next task.
• Communicating at the earliest opportunity; for example, when a member of the project team sees an issue with constructability, highlighting the problem before it reaches site and before it impacts other design work carried out in parallel.
• Reducing duplication of effort or abortive work by communicating decisions or analysis to the whole project team.

In the UK, the government has a clear BIM strategy that focuses on the efficient production, exchange, and use of data and information as the main means of delivering improved construction performance and savings.

The construction industry needs to safeguard against information loss and to start collecting, producing, submitting, and retrieving information digitally. You can currently manipulate digital information manually to suit different contexts, requirements, and exchanges. The next step is to enable automated information exchange, improve analysis capabilities, and encourage compliance checking.

In this emerging BIM environment, content needs to be

• Open
• Accessible
• Structured
• Understood
• Controlled
• Secure
• Standardized

To achieve this, you need to have standards around data, processes, and terms. Consider:

• Where is your information stored and backed up? At some point in the life of the asset, components will require replacement, upgrade, and maintenance. Knowing where to find the relevant information about the component at hand in the first place will save time and frustration.
• Who owns the data? The specifics of this question will be covered within the contractual documents. Make sure everyone within the project team including the client is clear about where the ownerships rest.
• What does the data represent — is the project sensitive or confidential? For example, making all information about a secure prison available wouldn’t be wise. It’s not unheard of for prisoners to get hold of sensitive building plans and tunnel their way out.
• Who has access to the information? Although not all team members need access to every piece of information, they do need the right information to contribute to a successful collaborative environment.
• How can you control access — can everyone manipulate it? Not everyone requires read-and-write access. In many cases, a read-only version of the data is adequate.
• How do you record changes? Can you track who’s accessed the information? Having a robust audit trail helps you see who has accessed and changed information, which may have an effect on others.

The opposite of interoperable (or open) is proprietary (or closed). Consultants and construction professionals sometimes use the word native rather than proprietary. If the client asks for native BIM outputs, you need to include the original file format of your 3D information as well as the 2D deliverables that you’ve extracted from the model.

A proprietary data format that’s particular to a BIM software vendor can be quickly, reliably, and efficiently updated and adapted to suit a changing market. However, in the long term, proprietary data formats prove expensive to maintain and support. You want to be able to exchange data no matter which software it came from; this is the very ethos of BIM.

Standards for the open exchange of digital data aren’t a new thing. They started to emerge in the late 1970s, based on agreements between the leading CAD vendors and users. In fact, in the mid-1980s the International Standards Organization (ISO) technical committee (TC) 184 Automation systems and integration, subcommittee 184/SC 4 Industrial data, developed something called the Standard for Exchange of Product (STEP) model data. ISO created STEP (ISO 10303) because ISO thought that none of the existing formats, on their own, could support an open standard across multiple industries.

The problem was that STEP took a long time and was just too slow and unresponsive to meet the fast-paced needs of an upcoming market in the construction industry. You can imagine that motivation started to develop for something specific to the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) and facilities management (FM) industries, and a separate way of working began to evolve from the structure of STEP — open BIM and the use of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC).

You rarely hear anyone use the full term “Industry Foundation Classes.” BIM users commonly understand IFC without necessarily knowing what the acronym means, just like people say JPEG or Scuba (joint photographic experts group and self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, in case you’re interested …).

Heading in the right direction: open BIM

Open BIM is an initiative of buildingSMART and several leading software venders and is a universal approach not only to collaborative design but also to the delivery, operation, and maintenance of assets, which are based upon open standards and workflows.

Open BIM is more than just IFC. It’s a commitment to open standards and engagement with the whole team across the life of a project. As a schema, IFC itself doesn’t and can’t provide interoperability alone; rather, it relies on the software packages interfacing with it. The schema sometimes sparks debate and criticism for omitted data or lost geometry, but is this due to the IFC standard or how the IFC schema is implemented in a particular platform? Limitations currently exist around IFC’s ability to contain parametric information and manipulate the size of an object; however, IFC Release 4 (IFC4) and subsequent future releases look to address this.

Today, most modern BIM authoring platforms support the import and/or export of IFC model data. buildingSMART even issues official certification to applications that comply with consistent procedures. This flow of information is critical for collaboration and interoperability, because it allows use between different authoring and downstream applications — just think of when facilities managers or structural engineers use your information.

buildingSMART together with a number of leading software venders designed open BIM around some fundamental principles to encourage the benefits of interoperability:

• No matter what software various teams are using, you should be able to participate and collaborate equally. buildingSMART calls this a “transparent, open workflow.”
• The size of BIM platform vendors isn’t an issue, because both small and large software companies should be able participate with system-independent solutions. They use an interesting term for this, “best-of-breed” — aiming to promote competition and innovation but within a specific area.
• The aim is that the construction industry can use a common language throughout client and commercial groups during the procurement process, making comparing and evaluating outputs, service levels, and the quality of data much easier no matter what tools the project team uses. Software versions and upgrades shouldn’t cause problems in your project either, because they all should be interoperable.
• By using open formats and standardization, open BIM also hopes that the project team will be able to use the output project data for much longer. If asset lifecycle tools for facility management can use the same formats then this avoids duplication of input and the errors that could result.

In the past, interdisciplinary collaboration has required cross-referencing each other’s 2D drawings, requiring the project lead to manage coordination manually. Clearly, complex 3D elements need a more robust level of coordination, and so open BIM uses a concept of a reference model. One of the benefits here is that open BIM maintains your authorship.

If you’re a consultant or supplier, because all vendors can participate in open BIM even with competing products, you can join any open project workflow without giving up the BIM tools you’re used to. If all projects were open, then nobody should be excluded based on their software platforms. You can work with anyone without having to use the same platforms.

IFC: Building bridges

BIM is often a solution to a problem that you didn’t know you had. However, parts of BIM can seem like solutions to problems you don’t have, not in your particular business anyway. Understand what part your information plays in the wider project team and find methods that meet your specific importing, editing, and exporting needs. IFC is an industry-wide, open, and neutral data format that’s fast becoming the de-facto standard for rich data exchange.

Ask yourself the following questions about the data you’ll use:

• What data are you receiving from others? What format is it in?
• What data are you supplying in proprietary formats?
• What other outputs and published documents do the client or the design team expect as project deliverables?
• What file formats will the rest of the project team be using?

If the people you’re working with are all using the same software, then interoperability isn’t an issue. But in the vast majority of projects, someone will be using tools you don’t use. Especially on international projects that move beyond traditional architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) and into civil engineering, you may see structural modeling or data analysis that you haven’t even encountered.

More commonly, projects may use two of the four big brands of BIM platforms: Autodesk, Trimble (including Tekla), Bentley, or Nemetschek (including Graphisoft), and you want to work together. That’s where IFC aims to build the bridge.

Meeting buildingSMART International

So who’s behind IFC? Well, the Industry Alliance for Interoperability was formed in 1994, involving 12 companies under the leadership of Autodesk and HOK, to prove the concept of interoperability and full information exchange between various software used across the building industry.

As part of an effort to develop a nonproprietary standard and take it global, the Alliance renamed itself the International Alliance for Interoperability in 1997 and it became a nonprofit group. The Alliance’s aim was to support the creation of open, international standards for data exchange, moving away from private and proprietary standards that were a bit locked down.

Renamed buildingSMART in 2005, the organization comprises chapters that are national membership organizations sharing the vision and goals of buildingSMART International. Chapters also develop and promote the use of open BIM in their countries through education and publications.

Investigating IFC

You may have seen people use the term IFC a lot when talking about interoperability and sharing information. In simple terms, IFC schemes provide the guidelines to determine what information is exchanged about an asset. Think of them as the rules for sharing the right data, a fundamental part of BIM.

IFC exists to help you collaborate by generating the rules, the model specification, as a standard. IFC schemes may include geometry, but aren’t limited to this. IFC presents your tangible building components, like walls and doors, and it allows you to link alphanumeric information (properties, quantities, and the classification structure) to your objects and maintain those relationships.

Since 1996, six principal schema releases have occurred: IFC1.5.1, IFC2.0, IFC2x, IFC2x2, IFC 2x3, and IFC4. (IFC4 is formally known as IFC 2x4.)

IFC4 is now registered with ISO as an official International Standard (ISO 16739:2013). buildingSMART hopes that software vendor implementation will increase. For further information on currently certified software and the software certification scheme, see the buildingSMART website (www.buildingsmart.com).

Supporting buildingSMART standards

Five basic standards and supporting frameworks overseen by buildingSMART surround open BIM and interoperability. They are

• Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)
• Information Delivery Manual (IDM)
• International Framework for Dictionaries (IFD)
• BIM Collaboration Format (BCF)
• Model View Definition (MVD)

The previous section discusses IFC, and the following sections examine the other four in more detail.

Developing and updating standards

You may work with standards on a regular basis in your daily work, and sometimes you receive notification that an update to the standard is available. As the industry evolves and changes, the construction industry needs to review standards documents to reflect current practice and future direction.

To do these reviews, the standards organisations like ISO and BSI set up committees of industry experts. The B/555 Committee is responsible for standards within construction design, modeling, and data exchange. B/555 sets out within its roadmap the maturity sequence that the standards will go through from Level 0 to Level 3 BIM, in accordance with the Bew-Richards BIM maturity model (refer to Chapter 9 for more information).

Analyzing PAS 1192

In the UK, the PAS plays a fundamental role in supporting the objectives of Level 2 BIM. It not only specifies the requirements for achieving it, but it also sets out the framework for collaborative working on BIM-enabled projects and provides specific guidance for the information management requirements associated with projects delivered using BIM.

PAS 1192 parts 2 and 3 together with its older sister standard BS 1192:2007 and now younger brother BS 1192:4 are the only tried and tested standards that support the UK Construction BIM Strategy to achieve Level 2 compliance and the desired reduction in CAPEX outturn cost. In the following sections you get to know them personally and what part each plays within the BIM process.

Providing the framework for data exchange

Originally developed by Bill East of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, COBie focuses on information rather than geometry and is described by the UK BIM Task Group as being “simple enough to be transmitted using a spreadsheet.”

COBie allows the project team to organize, document, and share information about assets in a standardized way. Simply, COBie allows the project team to capture the important data about a project in a really clear format, so that facility management and owner-operators can reuse it.

The spreadsheet format allows for high interoperability, and your COBie output could contain product manufacturer data, warranties, and equipment schedules.

Working with COBie

The purpose of COBie is to capture critical information for owners and operators to assist with the management of their assets. BS 1192-4 states that the “process of exchanging COBie deliverable should be integral to the whole facility lifecycle to maximise the benefit and efficiency of the employer-side pull for information.”

With the UK’s 2016 Level 2 BIM mandated deadline date fast approaching, the government has promoted COBie as the recommended open standard data format.

COBie is a subset of the BS ISO 16739 IFC, documented as a buildingSMART MVD, which includes operational information. The 2014 version of BS 1192-4 documents best practice recommendations for the implementation of COBie. (To use its full title, “Collaborative production of information Part 4: Fulfilling employer’s information exchange requirements using COBie — Code of practice.”)

In association with the open BIM network, NBS tested whether the buildingSMART IFC file format was capable of supporting the creation of COBie datasets. It did this by running a trial with the help of a number of principal UK contractors. The resulting IFC/COBie Report 2012 is available to download from www.thenbs.com.