Introducing buildingSMART in the USA

buildingSMART

The idea for buildingSMART originated from the USA but the key initiatives have been taken in Europe. This has been particularly the case in Norway where it has become the banner under which a number of world-leading projects have clustered.

In the United States, a recent report published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, www.nist.gov) identified the cost to US industry of not being able to interoperate between software applications. The cost was estimated to be in excess of USD15 billion annually. It would be safe to say that this problem is worldwide and has simply yet to be estimated elsewhere.

Many organizations in the US, as elsewhere throughout the world, have been moving towards using Building Information Modeling (BIM) software. That is, they are using the capabilities of new generations of software applications to define buildings so that 3D models, 2D drawings, equipment schedules and other information sets can be captured. In doing this, they are recognizing that they have to communicate with other partners in building projects that may not be using the same software. This recognition is causing them to look around and what they see is “buildingSMART”.

A major US initiative to help industry to develop and work with buildingSMART is the development of the National BIM Standard (NBIMS). Led by the Facilities Information Council, one of the councils established within the National Institute of Building Sciences, the NBIMS effort has rapidly gained support from federal agencies and industrial bodies with a number of leading organizations committing to support development of the standard.

A first key action in the NBIMS effort has been to make a formal definition for BIM (cited below). This is significant because there has not been a single agreed definition until now.

US definition of BIM

A Building Information Model is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility. As such it serves as a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during its life-cycle from inception onward.

A basic premise of BIM is collaboration by different stakeholders at different phases of the life cycle of a facility to insert, extract, update or modify information in the BIM to support and reflect the roles of that stakeholder. The BIM is a shared digital representation founded on open standards for interoperability.

The US National BIM Standard promotes the business requirement that this model be interoperable based on open standards.

IFC for GIS

Essentially, the NBIMS effort is seen as fulfilling the buildingSMART agenda since it combines methods of working within an industry with a requirement for open information exchange. The IFC specification is seen as one of the keys to this. Another key is the GML specification for geographic information developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The work carried out in the IFC-for-GIS project in Norway is also showing the way to transition data between the building and geographic worlds.

Work on NBIMS has been packaged into four teams covering scoping, development, testing and marketing. One of the initial goals of the Development Team was to establish a methodology for creating the NBIMS. They have adopted the Norway/UK developed Information Delivery Manual (IDM) process to guide development activities.

The Development Team considers that efforts related to the capture and exchange of information for contractually required data exchanges provide “low-hanging fruit”. Such projects result in rapid process improvement on topics of common interest. While not as flashy as projects that work in the design collaboration arena, these issues are of critical concern to those who manage projects. It is considered that such issues will also quickly establish the use of NBIMS as a practical effort that can provide real value.

Under auspices of NASA

The Development Team is currently working on the information exchange between Construction and Operations based on a project started in 2005 prior to the creation of NBIMS. This project, Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE), is under the auspices of NASA. An upcoming meeting will result in the definition of all standard business processes and information exchange requirements (IDM, Parts 1 and 2). COBIE pilots are planned at NASA and USACE projects.

Additionally, the NBIMS Development Team is endorsing the IAI North American Implementers Groups project related to Preliminary Design Information Exchange. It is expected that the Preliminary Design Information Exchange IDM can be directly adopted by NBIMS.

Similar to ByggSøk, Norway, and ePlanChecker Singapore

Also feeding into the work of the NBIMS Development Team is a project to enhance building codes produced by the International Code Council. This is a multi-stage project similar in nature to the Norwegian ByggSøk project in which the initial stage is to add tags to the codes to enable them to be electronically searched and compiled according to topic and requirement.

The aim is initially for codes to be visible through BIM use and to progress towards the stage of automatic compliance checking in a manner similar to the ePlanchecking effort in Singapore. Significant to the work on building codes is the recognition that a dictionary is required to support the tags used within the building codes. This is also seen as relevant to the development of next generation specifications that can form part of BIM. For this reason, leading specification providers and agencies such as ARCOM and CSI are collaborating with the code development.

The scale of the US construction industry makes the development and adoption of buildingSMART vitally important worldwide. Although the marketing initiatives behind IAI and buildingSMART originated within the US, adoption of the technologies resulting from work in these areas has lagged behind Europe and Asia. However, the aggressive program being adopted for NBIMS and the rapid growth in supporting developments suggest that this is about to change.