Institution of Civil Engineers ICE BIM Conference 2012

ICE BIM Conference 2012

Yesterday I attended the ICE BIM Conference, one of the highlights of the UK BIM calendar.

The day was split into different sections and to kick things off it was a chance for the UK Government BIM Task Group. The first speaker was Paul Morrell who as usual delivered a fantastic presentation:

A year and a bit on..how's it going? Stocks, Johnson, Morrell and Bew

• “The Government needs to learn how to be a good client for construction.”
• “There are over 270 specifications for slightly different asphalt systems – we need to reduce the number. Stop tinkering. Stop inventing the wheel.”
• “We need to track cost and carbon for all components that are used to build a building.”
• “The construction industry needs a new brand” – demonstrated by the slide “Jim’ll Mix It”. (see image below)
• “We need a library of objects. Defined property-set. The minimum required, what would be good to have and then leave room for innovation.”

Jim'll Mix It - or should that be "BIM'll fix it"?

Paul retires at the end of this month. And a huge amount of credit for the UK BIM push must go to him. Paul himself also found time to give credit to Mark Bew, “Two years on, the BIM strategy has stood up pretty well.”

It was interesting to see the UK global position slides that were first displayed at the Qatar conference were shown again:

Who is leading the world in BIM?

A little bit of comedy was also delivered when looking at COBie – we have to learn to love it…
But be careful when searching for it using Google Images…

We have to love COBie...

...but don't search for COBie using Google Images!

Jaimie Johnson was up next. Jaimie is on the core team leading the initial pilot projects. Some key points:

• Go to the BIMTaskGroup.org website and find out about everything - very transparent
• The plans of work from the various institutes are uniting under common stages 0->7 - from "strategic definition" (stage 0) to "in use" (stage 7).
• COBie is not just MS Excel - it is a data schema that will be an "invisible bucket" moving data from one software package to the next.
• The BIM Task Group are working with Nick Nisbet from AEC3/buildingSMART UK and NBS to define the property sets needed for the UK and level of detail to really make BIM fly. (see image below)

Nice for NBS and nationalBIMlibrary.com to get a mention on an HM Government slide!

Although he on a far-away-beach sunbathing - @thephilpster still makes an appearance

Terry Stocks gave a report from the "client's point of view". What had the progress been on the MoJ projects to date

The first Government projects

Next year's Stirling Prize winner - who wants to live here?

Then it was me up to talk a little more about the object libraries and the work being done to standardise the property sets that Paul and Jaimie had touched on. My presentation was a slight variation on my recent article on the BIMTaskGroup website:
- http://www.bimtaskgroup.org/the-importance-of-the-i-in-bim/

BIM - The information that matters

I couldn't possibly pass up the opportunity to play with the interactive voting buttons - questions and responses below...

Who is benefitting most from BIM at present?

Over time though - as information flows - the clients will get the best value

Nearly 100 of the 300 delegates hadn't heard of COBie

And finally I gave a little overview of the findings from the IFC/COBie trial - full report to follow in a few weeks time.

Who got a copy of the IFC/COBie report?

Before lunch there were a few excellent case studies from a civils point of view:

• The Jacobs Blackfriars underground project
• The £14.8bn Crossrail project - how they were building it all twice - once digitally and then physically
• The Stockholm Bypass - 21km of tunnels to build a six lane motorway - "Ytterst Effektivt Samarbete" everybody agreed!

As main sponsors Autodesk did an inspirational presentation on where technology is going - I'll try and find the clips for a Parsons Brinckerhoff Earthquake simulation and an onsite solar powered self generation replication machine (Catalonia) that was truly mind blowing.

The technology message was (1) Cloud and (2) Digital Fabrication.

Over the day one of the best things to see was the involvment of all - through round table discussions, twitter and iPad questioning. All in all another super BIM conference. Well done to the organisers!

The big. big questions get asked on Twitter and beamed onto the big screen for 300 delegates to ponder

And technology also used to great effect through live iPad questioning on each table