The Future of BIM

In class we discussed how BIM has not only been the biggest advancement in the building industry in quite some time, but it has also been one of the fastest developing technologies within the industry.  When first developed, the theories and ideas behind the technology were much further ahead than the technology.  With rapid advancements within the technology, it is becoming commonplace for designers and owners to prefer BIM implementation in their project.  BIM is allowing for better communication between the owners, designers, and different disciplines.   Better communication and integration will lead to better designs, more efficient building processes, and slightly cheaper building costs. 

As Kayleigh said in her post, the need for a dedicated BIM department will be pivotal in the success of architectural and engineering firms in the future.  With the complexity and potential for multidisciplinary integration, consistency within the design process will be very important.  These departments will control design standards and regulate families and model synchronization within the firm.  This integration will increase model efficiency and allow for further development of model use in the field.  Which brings me to the point that Junwah made; we are no longer limited to advanced technology only being available in the office.  With the advancement in mobile technology, there is reason to believe that a tablet device could be loaded with the BIM, allowing a contractor to navigate the model in the field when questions arise during construction.  I believe that within the next 5-10 years mobile device technology will allow for this type of integration in the field.

Source: BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers, and Contractors. Chuck Eastman, Paul Teicholz, Rafael Sacks and Kathleen Liston Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

  

Interoperability

Chapter 3 of the BIM Handbook discusses the importance of Interoperability, which is the the interaction of file types with different programs. With just a quick look through the chapter you can see how many different file types there are. Considering how much information one file has with it it is very important to make sure that file in its entirety can be transferred between one program and another. This may seem like a simple task at first, but it is anything but.

One of the reasons that file conversion is not as easy as it sounds it because there are so many different standards by which different companies make their products. David Morrison talks in his blog why different companies either usually have good interoperability or poor interoperability, and it comes down to, of course, money. But I do not think this is the only reason for such diversity. As software becomes more and more powerful, the things it can do grows exponentially. When the first CAD softwares were created there were typically used just for simple drawings, however now a CAD drawing is so much more than just lines, often having data such as material properties and other information. This leads to different professions needing different standards for their CAD drawings to contain the information they need. This comic wonderfully displays why there are so many file types.

Despite the shear number of file types and the problems that can arise from trying to make them accessible, there are several foundations and committees that have worked and are still working on trying to make the industry completely interoperable. This is a task worth working towards. I was in Nathan's group on the GIS project he talks about and the different file transfers required were ridiculous. For one file of about 700kb, it needed to be converted in one program so that it could be imported into another program. This process would take the 700kb file and make it into about seven 1mb files that when more than 1 was opened at a time would crash the program. Its problems like this that make interoperability a dream of every engineer and architect and any one else who uses these types of files across different software.

I think Autodesk has a good approach with its Revit line of products because it has a separate program for architectural design, structural design, and mechanical design, however all of these programs work off the same base so that they can all be combined easily. This is the kind of interoperability that the industry as a whole needs to achieve.

Interoperability

Interoperability is a crucial aspect of BIM, especially due to the complexity of buildings nowadays and the idea that building function as one cohesive machine, rather than a collection of systems. In practice, there are many designers working on each building: an architect, a structural engineer, an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer etc. These people and their systems need to be able to communicate with each other not only on site, but also during the design process. Therefore it is necessary for computer generated building systems created with different programs to be compatible and read by other interfaces.

Elda did a great job briefing about the technical aspect of interoperability in her post. Rather than repeating what she had already said, I would like to touch more of the impact interoperability has on BIM. In order to make buildings more efficient, many building systems are cross-disciplinary. A contractor might want to save cost by providing cheap envelope, but overall the building can turn out more expensive with a larger HVAC system and larger energy consumption. By providing interoperable design methods, the designers can see how their systems will work together in real life. As the BIM Handbook states, is it possible to conduct ANSI calculations using IFC with proper labeling. This can make design more efficient and help in providing ideal solutions in terms of energy management, cost reduction, and systems’ effect on one another. As we move forward to an era of more intelligent buildings, BIM interoperability is necessary to ensure compatibility and communications between systems and avoid errors due to miscommunication and complexity.

It is true that there are still problems with IFC and other formats, such as complex curve interpretation and other problems in translation, but I believe these problems will be solved in the near future. Autodesk software seem to be the most common type of software used today in the industry, which is a step towards standardization; but as long as other programs are used there has to be a way in which files can be translated from one program to another with as little errors as possible for an efficient interoperable BIM design.

Common Topic Labels for the Course

Below are topics that we'll address in the course.  This post also creates those topics as Labels for use when you're putting in your own blog posts.

TOPIC

AI

BIM

Building

Civil

Computer

Database

Design

Electrical

Environmental

Future

Hardware

HVAC

Manufacturing

Robotics

Sensor

Software

Structures

System

Term Project