Interoperability in BIM modeling

After reading Chapter 3 (Interoperability) of the BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers, and Contractors, I was left with a much better understanding of the challenges of interoperability of file formats in the BIM world. I think Tom and Elda did a great job in their articles describing exactly what interoperability is, and why is is so important. I thought Elda's point about the use of XML was very interesting to me, as I am somewhat familiar with XML as a programing language, and I am always amazed to see its potential in areas such as BIM.

What sparked my interest is the reasons behind interoperability. A company that does not provide as much interoperability is typically one who wants its standard / program to be king above the rest. Whereas a company that is looking for high interoperability would most likely be a company that wants its product to infiltrate the market. I do believe high interoperability is of paramount importance, because as a designer, this is always preferable to make choices on which tool can get the job done the fastest. NIST performed a study on the cost of the current levels of interoperability  and how much it is costing in delays and other expenses. The total number they came up with is approximately $10.6 billion (on page 6-17). This was way above the number I would have guessed, and really goes to show you how much time and effort is wasted on what might, on the outside, be considered a trivial subject.

AISC has a page on their website dedicated to interoperability. On that page I found one very interesting statement:

"Interoperability is a fundamental requirement as we progress to more projects being built using a BIM. However, it cannot be taken in isolation. Even if seamless interoperability was possible between the many software platforms our industry uses, there are many other issues that also need to be tackled before it could be taken advantage of, not the least of which are legal and contractual issue."

The idea, that in a perfect world, with perfect interoperability, there are still huge hurdles that must be overcome on the ownership and legal side. This does bring up important questions as to who would be in charge of how the file types are decided, and questions of this nature.

My personal experience with interoperability was during my last job, where we mainly used AutoCAD family of products. I ran into many problems attempting to open other clients projects from microstation, and other programs. the two programs are somewhat compatible, as their files could be imported and exported. However, the files were not perfect by any means once they were imported to AutoCAD. I spent plenty of hours fixing inconsistencies that occurred during the import process. Most of these files were 2D layouts, which should have been a somewhat easy task. The challenges as we move to BIM, where external variables and data must be stored about each object, and the time it takes to ensure that everything was imported/exported correctly is quite a daunting task.