buildingSMART Summit Week - Day Two

The day started with the key note speeches from senior members of BuildingSMART. The benefits of using interoperable BIMs were again reinforced (1) improved profitability, (2) easier to meet sustainability targets, (3) reduced risk and uncertainty. In terms of savings, the buildings in the US account for 40% of the nation’s energy use. Making buildings more efficient would make a major difference in the order of billions to the economy. Comparisons where made between the defence industry, the manufacturing industry, the aerospace industry and the construction industry. Due to how the construction industry is so fragmented it was noted that it is behind in terms of interoperable data models and processes. The general feeling is that the technology is here now, the challenge is getting people to use it and changing the existing processes.

Nyborg Strand Hotel

Rasso Steinmann presented the new certification for software applications that support IFC. One of the complaints about IFC from users is that the software applications have import and export limitations and sometimes the IFC data is not perfect.  In April this year buildingSMART have approved a new certification process to make the tests for IFC certification more explicit and tighter. Rasso demonstrated the global testing documentation server and how it will be used by software vendors to test their import/export processes.

Once a software vendor passes the tests then these test results will be made public and published.
Throughout the day there were presentations from the EU project InPro. This is a 13million euro four year project to change the way the construction industry works from 2d to open BIM. The team did a very interesting real-time demonstration of IFC being used as the neutral file format working between the software applications Revit Architecture 2012, Revit MEP 2012, Solibri Model Checker and Share-a-Space.com. Passing modified elements from the IFC model between the disciplines was demonstrated nicely on a simple “garden shed” building project. Notably IFC was used as the primary central file format on the InPro project and not simply used as a means to importing and exporting data.

A big day each year in the BIM calendar is the BIMStorm events. Yoshinobu Adachi presented Team BIM Tokyo’s efforts in the recent London event. He also promoted the BIM Live Tokyo event in which the teams compete over the internet and have 48 hours to submit their IFC models. They are judged on the designs, the analysis and the clash detections.

The BIPS part of the Summit in Nyborg is now complete and it's off to Copenhagen now. This evening delegates are getting a tour of the new Ramboll building in the city. Update: see some pictures from my visit here.

View from hotel