Final Blog: Course Reflection

At the completion of the “Intelligent Buildings” course, I can confidently say that the included curriculum has greatly exceeded my expectations. Similar to a number of my peers, I also believed that the course would be in large centered around the BIM design and construction technique. The amount of material presented on BIM was sufficient, as it broadly covered the many applications of the practice but did not detail all of the many features, as would a class on the subject. I found the speakers and their presentations of the applications to be inspiring, partly due to my construction operations background but mainly due to the futuristic but real-world applications of the technology available to my peers and I. This was a recurring trend when the class learned about artificial intelligence and the many ways that the industry can use the technology to advance designs and continue to provide services to clients and the public alike in an efficient and highly sophisticated package. The information naturally sparked conversations about morals and values with regards to the artificial intelligence, which further reinforced the consequences that engineers and designers must always keep in mind. Our work directly and indirectly affects human lives in ways that are not necessarily measurable in the broadest sense. I found the information and projects including raw databases useful because it was my first experience working with them outside of sophisticated Excel programs utilizing macros. Databases can be used to record vast amounts of information and require the designers to make provisions for the system to be designed for user interoperability as well as system efficiency. The database section made me realize that they are used for a number of tasks of which many I witnessed at my workplace. They use a few in-house databases for estimating and pre-construction purposes which are increasingly more important with shrinking margins and new construction techniques such as design-build. The marketing department is employing a database for customer relation management (CRM) to build and maintain current, past and prospective clients. I recently learned a project management software that was largely a database that contained all important project contract documents such as payment applications, schedules and budgets. The program had many of the database characteristics and required the effort early in the project to properly organize information effectively. The information presented on sensors and recording information was useful to my career because I am a MEP engineering student. Now and in the future, I expect to see a lot of the monitoring practices that we learned in class make their way into all buildings. The term project I chose to complete reinforced the ideas of the sensors and data management and allowed me to think in detail the equipment required to monitor energy required for one aspect of a building. I found it important to hear the experiences of one of the speakers which involved sensors and energy monitoring from the field point of view, as it is imperative that the product of the designers work is utilize correctly and to its full potential.

After reading Gabrielle's blog post and her feeling towards the database section, I've realized that while sometimes the least popular subject, databases can be used for a vast array of tasks. She mentions using databases for finances, for which I was surprised. I automatically use Excel when attempting to track costs and budgets, but her comment made me curious as to how the power to produce queries and reports can be used to track finances. Before this class, I would have not been interested in using databases to replace Excel with regards to computing and tracking finances.

The class was exactly what a professional elective should be; it was exciting, thought provoking and contained information relevant to industry procedures. Great choice!

In class presentation :
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11aSVuzmcpZD8IbCrQFZIo6SFaqRxDGQBwGJcrfXrJQ4/present?ueb=true#slide=id.p

Future Look - BIM for Owners and Facility Managers

A difference I noticed between the 2008 and 2011 editions of the BIM handbook was that in 2008 the handbook focused on the benefits of 3D drafting, while the 2011 edition focused much more on the benefits of 3D drafting for an integrative design process. In 2008, all disciplines could make separate models and eventually bring them together to form a cohesive design. Now, and in the 2011 version, it is possible for all disciplines to work together from the beginning of the design process using BIM.

This version of the handbook introduced the concept of Integrated Project Delivery. A difference this poses for owners is that they are now responsible for specifying the required scope and level of detail they want for a project before design begins. The design process is now changing in that multiple people are working on a design at the same time, which poses new legal issues concerning responsibility. As Kayleigh stated in her post, "the development of standards is a pivotal and important step in creating a cohesive use of the new method." Owners must understand and be able to communicate in BIM terms exactly what they want from their architects, engineers, and contractors, who will be responsible for what, and when. Like what Eric talked about in class last Tuesday, each project is unique and requires the owner to create BIM standards for every project.

Right now it seems that we have the technology to create fully integrated models between all disciplines but we do not have the proper space or memory to create files that large. On page 188 in the 2011 Handbook it states, “two to five years ago the creation of an integrated model required extensive effort on the part of a project team and dedicated technical expertise to support the integration. Today, many of BIM design tools have matured and provide integration capabilities between several disciplines at the generic object level. “ It seems that most members of my group agree that in the future, companies will have IT departments specifically there for BIM support to help address these issues.  With these advances, we also see performance issues with this technology. Within the next ten to fifteen years, I imagine this space to become accessible, and the norm will be for project design to be fully integrative from the beginning design stages. 

The Future of BIM Interoperability

I agree with Nathan that BIM will be integrated into the construction process regardless of problems with information transfer. While interoperability is admittedly a difficult and unavoidable problem in the current push for BIM as the industry standard for transfer of design information, I see some hope for improvement in the near future.

Within the next 5 years, it is my opinion that interoperability among programs within a specific software provider's repertoire (for instance, all Autodesk products) will improve to the point of near fluidity, so that there is even transfer to a central database of all aspects in a model. (This is one example of such a case in recent history) As Mr. Kuszewski discussed "saving to central" and "cloud-based computing" last week, it became evident that this level of capability is certainly present and need only be implemented across all products in a process known to the scholarly community as "data alignment." In essence, it is merely a process of organization and intentional consistency within a software group to facilitate interoperability and eliminate data loss between products/software-types.

However, in the same time period, I would not be surprised if the chasm of interoperability between competing software groups (ie. Autodesk vs. Bentley) widened. From the previous week's research, it seems like the degree of difficulty in information transfer is directly linked to the depth of information contained in a model. For instance, 2-D CAD models can very simply be converted to an open format, while 4 and even 5 dimensional models in Revit may contain a large amount of information about the individual building members that cannot be transferred cleanly to any other format than that in which they were created. By this line of reasoning, increasing capabilities of competing software types may likely complicate the transfer of data between them.

The solution to this un-interoperability, as Elda describes so well, might just be push for the IFC file format as a required standard. Despite many designer's aversion to this file type, it seems that on a global level, the IFC format is encouraged because it is an open source file type. The capabilities of design using this format are not as limited as one would think, and it certainly appears that they are improving. The Build Qatar event in 2012 was a great showcase of these capabilities.

Sources:

Aligning Misaligned Systemic Innovations: Probing Inter-Firm Effects Development in Project Networks

Intelligent distributed production control    

Asite announce BIM Academy, BIM Unlimited, Aidea and Niven Architects as winners of Build Qatar Live 2012

BIM in the Future

To this day, BIM has been very successful with its users and many companies benefit from it daily.  With this being said, we can expect great things in the future.  Considering the importance of data management throughout project constructions, BIM generates the data from beginning to end and from multiple users.  As an effective source of communication, BIM can solve many problems to clients as everything is made available to them.  An obstacle that exists nowadays is the fact that some people don’t know of the existence of BIM and don’t fully understand its advantages.  There will always be the people who don’t like change and are used to the way they have done it for some may years, call it the “old-fashion” way, and feel like there is no need to bring in anything new and ‘complicated’.  Due to this and in order to overcome this obstacle, colleges should introduce BIM to their students so that by the time they graduate college, they can be proficient and apply their skills in the workplace.  I agree with my fellow classmate, Gabriel Carpenter, who predicts what will happen in the workplace soon after the introduction of BIM: “either CAD drafters are expected to learn the new technology, entry-level engineers – who specify that they know the technology – are recruited to draft, or companies have to reach outside the company to hire another firm to do their BIM work for them.” In the end, the industry will be using and expecting everyone to use BIM.

            According to Mr. Eric Kuszewski, a BIM expert who has heavily worked with AutoCAD and Revit, admits that there are some challenges with BIM in the current time.  These include the learning curve and training, level of detailing, interdisciplinary workflow, IT infrastructure, and communication.  He expressed that nowadays BIM has these limitations that might make companies hold out and hesitate on using BIM.  Yet to counteract this argument, Dell and DB+C claimed that “in the United States, architects are the heaviest users of BIM, using it on more than 60% of their projects, compared with 43% of architects who claimed to be BIM users in 2008".  From this, we can deduce that in the next five years twenty percent more, approximately a total of 80%, of architects will be using BIM.  In addition, Jennifer M. McGregor, Executive Director of Obelisk, predicted, “In the next three years, we’ll all be converted to using BIM”.  These optimistic expectations are enough proof that the BIM world is quickly spreading throughout the industries.  

Sources:

http://www.wbdg.org/pdfs/1103_dell_bdc_whitepaper.pdf

http://iidahq.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/the-future-is-here-and-its-bim/

Future Outlook on BIM Tools and Parametric Modeling

As presented in my post from last week, I do not believe the progress of BIM and its tools and parametric modeling are not going to be the issue in the building and construction industry.  With time the software and hardware issues will undoubtedly be resolved as well as upgraded and the systems will become more compatible, as well as user friendly.  And, I do not doubt that drafting in BIM will become a specialty skill as mentioned by G. Carpenter and required to a certain degree for those in the industry as mentioned in J. Lancellotti’s post.  The issues that have and will most likely continue to slow down the progress of BIM are the industry conventions that all groups within the industry have built their practices around.  This was addressed by our speaker Eric Kuszewski during our week 3 class.  He addressed the fact that many of the building system drawings and efforts were being doubled as a result of wanting to use BIM to show it one way and then the system engineer or someone else wanting to see in another way, or the “old” way.  He also addressed that this not only affected the engineers and their products, but those dealing with the contracts, deliverables, and metrics.  The groups that work on the latter have built what they do around the existing conventions.

As a result, I believe the BIM execution plan that Kuszewski mentioned will be heavily involved in creating new BIM centered conventions.  I do not believe that in 5 years everything will have completely made the switch to being “BIM-centric,” but the ability for all those involved to work together to shift from the practice of making separate drawings for buildings to virtually creating the building will be much improved as a result of one building era ending as the beginning of another approaches.  These changes may indeed result in the predictions made by M. Tedesco regarding the industry in ten and twenty years.