While there has been some criticism about the academic and conceptual nature of many of the presentations at the GeoDesign Summit, the break out idea lab on BIM and GIS integration drew a spillover crowd of project managers across infrastructure disciplines. The focus of these discussions was on project implementation and workflow rather than the big and little d of design. Attendees dismissed some of the attempts to introduce analytical review to influence design decisions, asserting that unless the analytical input is in real-time, it won’t have any impact on the design process.
The group tackled many of the pain points between the different software platforms, speaking to issues of interoperability and culture. When speaking about standards, there was a general frustration with the Industry Foundation Class (IFC) format that is the means of BIM data sharing, given that it is large and cumbersome with very few people really understanding all that it contains. The group expressed an interest in tools that would help parse this format to be able to extract from it those elements that are needed for different project stages, such as the extraction of the building envelope for larger-scale visualizations within a GIS.
With complex BIM models, there was agreement that it’s difficult to know what you want out of the model, and often impossible to get what you want without hours of rework. Attendees describe a black box technology that would parse and thoroughly understand the IFC schema, providing intuitive wizards to unwind the schema for simple understanding.
What everyone is after is a seamless scale from region to city to the building level, but the disconnection between software and formats creates great frustrations. Ideally, there would be a means to query, extract and visualize across disparate systems, and a means to keep all disparate views and packaging of a project in sync. Particularly of interest is an as-built and operations model that keeps up to date for the long-term maintenance of a facility, which represents the bulk of the cost of the facility.
The current practice requires a lot of custom work that is driven by contract requirements, as well as the tools at hand. AECOM has perhaps the ultimate challenge that represents the current reality, as this large global professional project management firm has 15,000 employees that are using 1,400 design and management software packages. They, like others, spend a good deal of time and resources building project-specific widgets for data extraction getting information from and to all the different tools that are in use.
One comment that resonated was that the ability to get information out of BIM means that it needs to be there first. Often there’s a reluctance to share what’s actually in the model, because the logical progression is that everyone will just want more from the model, which will slow down workflows. The more communication and interaction within the model the better, without the need for extraction.
When the group was asked what can Esri can do to help address problems, there was an urge to prioritize quick wins across all the disciplines. It was suggested that the first incremental improvement was to work directly with the large CAD vendors to standardize a means to extract the building shell from all the different packages so that they can be easily visualized in a larger geographic context. Evangelizing the needs of the user among the software vendor community, and adopting standards for true interoperability, would have huge economic impact at the project implementation phase.
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Matt,
Great review of the session. Wish I could have been there. Please provide additional information when you catch up after GeoDesign.
You might want to also check out the buildingSMART GIS – BIM alliance. Information here:
http://www.buildingsmartalliance.org/index.php/projects/activeprojects/27
Greg
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