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Geoinformatics_06-2009
article seeking a global path bim standards efforts global market factors are forcing a revolution in the way professionals share and use information throughout the lifecycles of buildings and capital projects such as airports, roads and subways. building information models (bim) are a critical element in this information sharing revolution. this article provides an overview of the current state of bim standards and what they will, hopefully, through international collaboration, become in a web-connected world. by raj singh global market factors are forcing a revolution in the way professionals share and use information throughout the lifecycles of buildings and capital projects such as airports, roads and subways. building information models (bim) are a critical element in this information sharing revolution. a bim is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a building or other facility. a bim can represent viewpoints, graphically and in text and table form, of a building from the perspective of any practitioner involved with the building. a bim serves as an evolving and widely shared resource or ideally, a network-connected collection of resources for information about a facility, from the facility s earliest planning stages to demolition and historical records. figure 1: a building information model (bim) provides a way for a wide range of professionals to publish, discover, access, fuse, update and revise data about a building or capital project. (figure adapted from buildingsmart alliance) market factors players in the architecture, engineering, and construction (aec) industry as well as building owners, brokers, component vendors, operators, insurers, inspectors, tenants, finance companies, fire departments and other stakeholders want to be able to provide information to other stakeholders or use information created by other stakeholders. they want to see, test and modify buildings in collaborative planning sessions while the buildings are being designed, and they want to know as much as possible about risks, liabilities, costs, options and opportunities before they commit to designs and contracts. some want the encoded descriptions of their offerings or requirements to be as discoverable and usable as possible. others want to take full advantage of smart building sensor/actuator systems and smart grid energy generation and storage components and utility energy management programs. competition is a key driver in many of the professions that work with buildings. aec businesses, which often work in teams, need the best it resources to outperform the competition in completing projects and still remain within budget and on schedule. advanced telecommunications enables professional services companies in countries like india to compete for contracts for projects in the us and europe. and especially during a recession, competing investors, buyers, brokers and others are demanding more information to inform their decision-making processes. energy is increasingly important. approximately 40% of energy in developed nations is consumed in buildings. in addition, construction of manmade structures consumes 75% of the raw materials extracted from the earth. thus, stakeholders are wisely factoring in energy costs that will rise due to governments climate risk management efforts, resource constraints, world economic growth and other factors. and they are factoring in the fact that rising energy prices raise the costs of building materials. also, many stakeholders are increasingly concerned, for marketing or altruistic reasons, about materials carbon footprints, local origin, toxicity and other sustainability factors. as energy costs rise, products such as solar panels, meters, sensors and controllers are becoming more practical. all these factors underscore that energy analysis is becoming an imperative. the smarter and more fine-tuned our buildings become and the more we integrate them into community energy schemes, the more opportunity there is to take advantage of bim for such post-construction activities such as operations analysis and coordination with the inputs and outputs of other facilities. stakeholders are becoming more sophisticated about the wide range of complex issues that enter into decisions. bim supports simulation and modeling tools that help professionals manage complexity and communicate the reasons for their decisions. bim software = bim 1.0 for a decade or more, it vendors serving the aec market have been aware of bim as a user need and market opportunity. the vendors have progressively converged capabilities like geographic information systems (gis), computer-aided design (cad), project management, cost estimating, specification, energy analysis, structural engineering and 3d visualization to deliver within the confines of their product families many useful bim capabilities. sometimes they have provided a degree of interoperability by offering ways for their bim software to share some data, for example, with the database, spreadsheet, and text document software offered by major platform vendors, or with third party product vendors who are licensed to use the bim software vendor s proprietary apis or file formats. but, because of proprietary apis and file formats, full design models from the different aec software vendors seldom interoperate, and thus their bim solutions frustrate users who need to share information with other stakeholders who are using software from other vendors. to solve this problem, experts from around the world collaborated to define and develop a framework for data exchange based on an open september 2009 24
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