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

NBS Domestic Specification - Coming Soon As An Online Product

Two or three years ago RIBA Enterprises published NBS Domestic - a loose-leaf paper specification for use on small domestic projects. This has been very successful, but feedback from specifiers has been clear that this should be an electronic product.

I am very excited to be able to say that an electronic version of this is now only a few months away from launch and is now undergoing beta testing.

NBS Domestic Specification is an internet application and will therefore work on pretty much any platform... PC, Mac or even Apple IPad. I cannot say too much for now - but please find some teaser screenshots below and keep tuned to this blog for more information over the coming weeks!

Sign in to NBS Domestic within your web browser and click to create a new specification

(click image for larger view)

Select your contract particulars and work sections

Edit your NBS specification with synchronized guidance and drop down suggested values

Publish your finished specification to PDF

buildingSMART Summit Week - Day One

After a pretty smooth journey on the Sunday from Newcastle to Copenhagen by air followed by a train journey across Denmark to Nyborg I attended the first day of the buildingSMART summit.

The amazing rail and road bridge at Nyborg

The first presentation was from John Mitchell from the University of South Wales in Australia. A couple of case studies were shown to demonstrate the main benefits of BIM.  The main benefits of an open BIM is in passing the model between the disciplines. For example, The Ark Project in North Sydney had the Structural Engineer and Architect working off an ArchiCAD BIM, but exporting to IFC for clash detection in with the M&E Engineer’s Revit MEP BIM. The classic example from Australia is the Sydney Opera House. This was modelled in Bentley and then exported using IFC to ArchiCAD. Potential clash detection between the structural elements and the M&E systems is clearly the main driver for interoperable BIMs. John also presented results from a survey of over 250 professionals that showed BIM was getting used to a degree by over 75% of these. Of those not using BIM around 75% intend to use it in the next 1-3 years.

The Ark Project

Francois Grobler from the US Army Corps of Engineers presented a number of drivers including top-down mandates in the US to improve efficiencies in the construction industry. For example, all new federal buildings in the US must be designed to be net-zero-energy use by 2020. On particular development that seemed very interesting was the COBie XML file format that the US Army are using for information transfer once the project is handed from the construction team to the building operator/owner. It seems to be a more simple way of documenting materials and spaces without the complex geometries of a CAD BIM model.

As always I was fascinated by the IFD project. Jacob Mehus presented some very interesting developments in Norway where the Norwegian Defence Agency have said they will now procure their projects using IFD. So any manufacturer who wants their products to be used on any of these projects must add them, defined by IFD, to a searchable database. The designer can then feed in data from their IFC BIM model into the engine and compliant products will be returned. This all sounds very interesting and I look forward to attending the IFD workshop day in Copenhagen on Thursday.

Following the IFD presentation, Thomas Liebich then “unveiled” some of the improvements for the IFC 2x4 release. The many improvements include geometric, efficiency, support for light and texture and improved documentation and samples. It will be presented to ISO as a draft standard next year and hopefully released in 2011. A couple of quotes, “The most encompassing and complete open specification for BIM”, “It has been seven years in its making – we’ve gone for quality over speed in release management”. At the end of the presentation there was discussion as to how fast the software vendors will implement IFC 2x4 import and export following its release. Thomas indicated that the certification tests will be tighter than in the past.

Inham Kim from Kyung-Hee University, Korea , presented how BIM was used to judge the design team competition for the KPX Headquarter relocation project. This was a $45m project with over $2m being spent on the design. All designers entering the competition got free software (ArchiCAD, Revit, SketchUp) for three months. The designs were judged entirely on the BIMs that they submitted. The BIMS were used to generate rendered images, perform energy analysis, clash detection analysis and generate animations.

BIM specialists Gravicon from Finland did an interesting presentation of their role on the design of the Helsinki Music Centre. The use of the BIM to test the acoustic performance was fascinating, how it was possible to tilt the seating areas in the x, y and z direction to get the optimal acoustic performance. Following this was the final presentation of the day by Martin Tamke who compared the BIM tools used by the manufacturing industry with those used by the construction industry. This included some beautiful curved surfaces in buildings that can only really be generated, fabricated and built using BIM technology.

Off to Denmark

I'm having the pleasure of attending the buildingSMART Summit in Denmark next week. I'll publish a few posts about it all next week for those interested.

The timetable for myself is:

• Monday - Presentations on the use of BIM for the Sydney Opera House and by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the morning. Talks on IFC, IFD, the Helsinki Music Centre and Open BIM design in the afternoon.
  
• Tuesday - Software certification and the EU Inpro project.
  
• Wednesday - BIM from a client, cost management and facility management point of view.
  
• Thursday - IFD workshop 

NBS on the road

Over the next few months NBS will be on the road at a few CAD/BIM events.

• I will be at the BuildingSMART summit week in Denmark at the start of September. It's always fascinating to see what is happening around the world with interoperable building information models. Hopefully this will give us at RIBA Enterprises some further inspiration into BIM. It will maybe help influence our thinking in our research products with Northumbria University on this subject.
  
• The NBS Link tool linking ArchiCAD and NBS will be featured at the ArchiCAD Summer School in Nottingham. Unfortunately this clashes with the BuildingSMART summit. But NBS will be represented there.
  
• Finally I will be presenting at the Vectorworks Annual Conference in London in early October. So if anyone wants to see the NBS export to Vectorworks Notes Manager format - please register for that.

Vectorworks Notes Manager Export Now Available

The latest update of NBS Tools now includes the export to Nemetschek Vectorworks Notes Manager format.

http://www.theNBS.com/NBSTools

Carbon Assessment Tool - Project iCAT

At NBS we are now working on a very interesting project looking at an carbon assessment tool for the construction industry. The following press release went out today...

Press release:
A new industry project codenamed ‘iCAT’ is launched – with the aim of creating an everyday design tool to facilitate carbon assessment.

A new collaborative industry project team led by AEC3 UK is developing the Interoperable Carbon Assessment Toolkit or ‘iCAT’ for embodied carbon calculations, which will enhance the design and life cycle management of zero carbon and low impact buildings.

AEC3 UK is leading an expert academic and industry project team, including: the University of Northumbria, BSRIA, Faithful and Gould, RIBA Enterprises, Autodesk, and the University of Bath. The iCAT project is part-funded by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB).

Focusing on the early, feasibility and pre-design stages, iCAT will enable designers, cost consultants and their clients to minimise life cycle carbon and economic costs though improved decision-making.

iCAT will be available as an interoperable online tool, using data from the University of Bath’s Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE) database, along with other carbon embodiment and building modelling data from mainstream design and analysis tools. Mark Bew, Chair of BuildingSMART UK and Director of Scott Wilson, says: “we welcome the development of iCAT, which will exploit the benefits of interoperable design tools. iCAT offers a much-needed integration of carbon assessment data and methodologies to manage building carbon data from cradle to grave”.

NBS Link Plug-in for ArchiCAD Press Release

The NBS Link plug-in for ArchiCAD features on the front of the Graphisoft International website. The press release is below...

www.graphisoft.com

Link your NBS project specification information to your ArchiCAD Building Information Model

LONDON, July 27, 2010

GRAPHISOFT today announced that ArchiCAD™, its award-winning architectural design software, can now link directly with NBS specifications. This capability continues the company’s innovation in model-based design collaboration by offering an easy-to-use, yet powerful connection with documents produced with the UK’s industry-standard master specification system.

The connection delivers productivity improvements to architects and other specifiers by providing a quick and easy-to-use method within ArchiCAD for creating links between the information modeled in ArchiCAD and that modeled in NBS. Clause titles and references can be added with a single mouse-click; NBS guidance can be viewed in context to assist decision making; and the specification details can be easily reviewed and revised, with an automated link ensuring the details in the specification and ArchiCAD models remain in sync.

This latest ArchiCAD plug-in from GRAPHISOFT links to specifications written in any of NBS specification systems, including NBS Building, NBS Engineering Services, NBS Landscape and NBS Scheduler.

“Building Information Modeling (BIM) has created an unprecedented potential for improving the coordination and quality of design and construction documentation,” said Simon Gilbert, ArchiCAD Product Manager at GRAPHISOFT. “With this connection between ArchiCAD and NBS, architects and designers can be assured that the specification details in their designs are accurate and, perhaps just as important, the effort required to place and maintain specification details has been reduced hugely.”

Dr Stephen Hamil, from the research and development department of NBS, echoed Simon’s comments. “Bringing the information held in project specifications and that held within the CAD model closer, and providing the user the ability to maintain these relationships in this way, is an important development in the evolution of BIM. The road to integrated coordination of project information will be made up of small but significant steps like this, and we are pleased to have supported GRAPHISOFT in the UK to be able to make this innovation available to users of ArchiCAD and NBS.”

Nick Greenwood, of Mouchel Business Services, who has been trialing the new connection, commented, “Marking up the architectural model with specification references is a very important part of preparing high quality construction documentation but it is also very tedious and repetitive work. And, of course, if it’s being done manually from paper specifications it’s easy to make a mistake when transcribing a specification number. This connection makes it really simple and quick to apply specification details to any view or document in the design and it’s really great having such a simple method to check that the details are up to date. This is an enormous time saver for us both in applying the specifications in the first place and ensuring that the correct specification details are on the final documentation.”

A movie showing the scope of NBS Building, how this is connected with ArchiCAD, and how specifications can be reviewed and revised in ArchiCAD, is at www.tinyurl.com/nbslink

Availability

The ArchiCAD to NBS connection is available immediately and can be obtained from Accredited ArchiCAD Centres in the UK and Ireland. These Centres can be located at www.graphisoft.com/purchase

About NBS

Since the 1970s, architects have turned to NBS master specification systems to produce technically robust, up-to-date project specifications. NBS also provides tools for project administration, online access to technical and regulatory information, and learning services to keep construction professionals' skills and knowledge current. It is also the official publisher of the Approved Documents to the Building Regulations. Further information, can be found at www.theNBS.com. Further media requests can be made to James Sykes at james.sykes@theNBS.com

About GRAPHISOFT

GRAPHISOFT® ignited the BIM revolution with ArchiCAD®, the industry first BIM software for architects. GRAPHISOFT continues to lead the industry with innovative solutions such as the revolutionary GRAPHISOFT BIM Server™, the world’s first real-time BIM collaboration environment, and the GRAPHISOFT EcoDesigner™, the world's first fully integrated building energy modeling application. GRAPHISOFT’s innovative solutions have fundamentally changed the way architects around the world design and collaborate.