Similar to how investments in areas that both benefit our planet and our economy are gaining ground, the Open Geospatial Consortium is calling for key building industry players to make a relatively small investment of time and money with the potential for a huge pay-off. Working together to create a common vision and program for interoperability among their information systems will eliminate waste and increase profits.

Similar to how investments in areas that both benefit our planet and our economy are gaining ground, the Open Geospatial Consortium is calling for key building industry players to make a relatively small investment of time and money with the potential for a huge pay-off. Working together to create a common vision and program for interoperability among their information systems will eliminate waste and increase profits.

• The McGraw-Hill Construction Outlook 2009 Industry Forecast and Trends demonstrates that waste in the $4.6 trillion global construction building industry has huge environmental as well as economic consequences. (Report Here)
• In 2004, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Construction Users Roundtable both issued reports  that highlighted 30 percent waste in building projects, which translates to about $15 billion in waste for U.S. federal projects alone. (NIST Report , CURT Report)
• The American Institute of Architects reports that, "buildings and their construction account for nearly half of all the greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumed in this country each year.” (Report Here [PDF])

The combined statistics from these reports clearly show the environmental costs of waste from the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) market. 

Throughout the lifecycle of a building or other capital project such as an airport or freight terminal, much of the waste is a result of people not having access to information that others have created but that is not discoverable or accessible when it is needed. Wrong or insufficient information results in waste, and waste costs money, whether the waste comes from change order requests during construction, engineering errors, manual re-entry of data, redundant data collection, unnecessary meetings, mistakes in component dimensions or quantities, or over-design to allow for uncertainty. But almost all such waste also translates into wasted natural resources--wasted electricity, wasted “embedded energy” in materials like cement and steel, and wasted hauling and travel.

The United States and other developed countries face massive capital projects expenditures to repair or replace crumbling infrastructure. And many developing countries, most significantly China and India, are actively building or preparing to build infrastructure. But there are serious obstacles for all countries, the costs of physical infrastructure construction and operation rise with the price of limited natural resources. Worldwide, the public, press, legislators and regulators are increasingly aware of human activities' "externalities," that is, societal and environmental consequences, including global warming. And we are entering a global recession. For all these reasons, government funding agencies and private investors have a growing interest in ways to reduce waste in buildings and capital projects.
 
Each of these problems lends special significance to the Japanese term for wasteful and unproductive activity -- “muda” (無駄) -- which has a connotation of loss to the community, not just loss to the individual. The global financial crisis may temporarily reduce the resource and climate crises through reduced demand for oil and other resources whose production generates CO2 emissions. But all three crises are long-term community crises that inexorably raise the profile of waste in the lifecycles of buildings and physical infrastructure.
 

The Problem With Existing Standards

For years, players in the global multi-trillion dollar AEC market have grappled with the problem of how to develop and ensure vendor adoption of market-driven information technology standards and stakeholder-agreed policies that promote efficient data sharing.  A 2007 McGraw Hill Construction SmartMarket Report documents the AEC’s pressing business concerns involving interoperability (Report Here).

Building Information Model (BIM) is the term used to describe a comprehensive, dynamic and easily updated and accessible body of information about a building or capital project. It is generally recognized that there are phases to any building's lifecycle and at the most general levels they are design, construction, and management. Building information modeling offers access to the following critical information across the lifecycle:
• In the design phase—design, schedule, and budget information
• In the construction phase—quality, schedule, and cost information
• In the management phase—performance, utilization, and financial information

A building information model characterizes the geometry, spatial relationships, geographic information, quantities and properties of building elements, cost estimates, material inventories and project schedule. This model can be used to demonstrate the entire building life cycle. As a result, quantities and shared properties of materials can be readily extracted. Scopes of work can be easily isolated and defined. Systems, assemblies, and sequences can be shown in a relative scale with the entire facility or group of facilities. The construction documents such as the drawings, procurement details, submittal processes and other specifications can be easily interrelated.

A building information model can be used for the following purposes:
• Visualization: 3D renderings can be easily generated.
• Fabrication/shop drawings: Shop drawings can be generated for various building systems, e.g., the sheet metal ductwork.
• Code reviews: Fire departments, building permits officials may use these models for building projects review.
• Forensic analysis: A building information model can easily be adapted to graphically illustrate potential failures, leaks, evacuation plans, etc.
• Facilities management: Facilities management departments can use BIM for renovations, space planning, and maintenance operations.
• Cost estimating: Some BIM software(s) have features for cost estimating. Material quantities are automatically extracted and changed when any changes are made in the model.
• Construction sequencing: A building information model can be used to create material ordering, fabrication, and delivery schedules for building components.
• Conflict, interference and collision detection: Because BIM models are created, to scale, in 3D space, all major systems can be visually checked for interferences. This process can verify for example that piping does not intersect with steel beams, ducts or walls.

There is now growing demand on the part of building owners and operators to approach the general issues of waste and cost by requiring more granular information earlier.  By this we mean having the capability to request cost information with early design models, or to subject an early design to energy performance analysis.

Since capital projects involve many disciplines and trades, owners and operators often seek out to contract with a team from the very beginning that includes an architect, general contractor and specialized engineers.  As people from these individual organizations come together to form a project team, they bring their own information architectures and information development capabilities based on commercial software to the table.

The industry’s information technology suppliers have not ignored the BIM imperative. Individually, most AEC computer aided design (CAD) vendors offer BIM solutions for design authoring, costing, project management.  The problem is that these BIM solutions are not open solutions and when information from one vendor needs to interact with information from other vendors, the lack of interoperability makes it expensive to produce deliverables.

Different proprietary BIM solutions do not interoperate well, and not everyone who needs information about a building uses the same CAD or BIM software. Vendors may expose their data formats to developers of other BIM-related software, but it is expensive for individual developers to keep up with other competing CAD vendors' evolving formats and interfaces.  Ultimately information has a high probability of getting lost or mis-transmitted, which results in costs and risks.

The global user community, through the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI), has tried to provide consensus-based open standards that provide "many to many" interoperability. IAI will issue Version 2.4 of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) Information Mode by early 2009. IFC is a text-based data representation standard used to support information exchange and sharing of project lifecycle data about a building. IFC addresses some of the basic data exchange requirements for building geometry and building property information.
 
The problem is that IFC is essentially a transfer standard or batch file conversion standard, analogous to the Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) introduced into the GIS industry in 1992 by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Like SDTS, IFC is cumbersome and vendors have had little guidance or incentive to ensure that their implementations are consistent with other vendors’ implementations.

The “I” in BIM is not about automating paper-based processes.  It is about synchronizing information across applications to speed up, make more relevant and shorten certain building-related workflows. It is about simulation, decision support, data bases, and purpose-driven content sharing. To address the business issues confronting the global building industry, any vendor’s BIM needs to interoperate across the Internet with a wide range of other software solutions, providing a reliable basis for tracking and making decisions during the building's life cycle. 

The AEC community needs to address the future by transitioning away from file-based computing and towards network-based computing. We hear continuously that AEC companies and owner/operators want to be able to discover, access and “fuse” information to support their decision-making throughout the building's entire life cycle.  This means transitioning from heavy clients that rely on discrete drawings and passing of large data files that belong to specific software systems and specific projects to passing messages that enable shared access to data objects that reside in Web-accessible data bases. The future is about getting just the information you need from wherever that information resides to do the job at hand. Just as Google or Microsoft enable anyone with a browser to access their huge spatial databases to get a particular map view (without downloading the whole database), an architect, planner, permitter or building owner should be able to get specific information from their information collections and repositories.

AECOO-1 Testbed: First step towards more interoperable building information

In North America, a broad cross section of vendors, expert practitioners and universities have come together in the buildingSMART alliance (bSa) to address network computing interoperability related to the construction and management of buildings. The bSa seeks to coordinate “the profound constructive changes coming to the fragmented real property industry in North America.” The organization now has more than 200 active members and is pressing forward on projects that will help coordinate standards efforts and yield candidate market-driven standards for consideration by NBIMS.
 
The buildingSMART alliance recognizes that vendor solutions (the so called “BIM software,” but also software for such things as project management, quantity take off, cost estimating, and code specification and checking) all have different strengths for authoring, processing, display, extraction, transformation and decision support. They provide different capabilities that are useful at various points across the lifecycle. The idea is to enable them to connect with each other no matter whether the application software is about complementary building information activities (such as structural engineering) or upstream and downstream information applications (such as urban planning or energy analysis).
 
The OGC and the bSa have joined forces to develop candidate BIM standards in the joint bSa-OGC Architecture / Engineering / Construction / Owner / Operator Testbed (AECOO-1). The AECOO-1 sponsors and participants are using the OGC Interoperability Program to advance interoperability standards that enable direct Web-based communication between the various kinds of information systems used to develop and manage capital facilities. The AECOO-1 Testbed is a first step towards achieving service-based interoperability in the AECOO world.
 
The OGC and the buildingSMART alliance conceived AECOO-1 as an OGC testbed for several reasons. One reason is that geospatial information is one of the kinds of information that goes into a building information systems, and previous OGC testbeds have involved BIM “threads” that clarified CAD/3D/geospatial interoperability issues.

Also, the OGC has worked with organizations such as the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) and the Web3D Consortium to facilitate simulation interoperability and the communication of real-time 3D across applications and XML web services. OGC's other standards coordination efforts in areas such as workflow, emergency communications, sensor webs and location services are also pertinent to AEC market modernization.
 
But the main reason that the bSa and a blue ribbon list of sponsors chose to work with the OGC is that the OGC provides a uniquely fast and inclusive formal process in which diverse cooperating stakeholders can define market driven interoperability solutions and global IT-based standards for the AECOO market. Geospatial integration, in fact, is not addressed in AECOO-1, but it is expected that it will be addressed in follow-on testbeds and/or interoperability experiments. The two AECOO-1 technology threads chosen by AECOO-1 sponsors are: 1) building performance and energy analysis and 2) quantity take-off, that is, standards-based ways to derive more accurate quantity information and cost information from a building model.

Clearly the use of BIMs in energy analysis is important for sustainability.  Improved quantity take-off is also important, because fewer natural resources are wasted when exactly the right amount of material or the right number of building components are delivered to a site. As open BIM standards evolve, they will be critical enablers for workflows that integrate the entire design team and emphasize green solutions from the start.
 
AECOO-1 sponsors include these companies, agencies and non-governmental organizations:
-            Associated General Contractors of America
-            American Institute of Architects
-            Burt Hill
-            Ellerbe Becket
-            Gilbane Development Corporation
-            HOK
-            Large Firm Round Table
-            Statsbygg (Norway)
-            US National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)
-            US General Services Administration
-            Webcor Builders
 
A large number of AECOO-1 Testbed participants -- software vendors and integrators -- are working to address the sponsors’ requirements. The first work is focused on the “conceptual design” phase. That is, the purpose of this testbed is to define the types of information that are required to support analysis during the conceptual design phase in the project delivery process. Participants are developing specific document types for building performance and energy analysis, including an Information Delivery Manual and a Model View Definition.
 
Many of OGC’s service interface standards and encoding standards relate to AEC needs.  For example:
 
•    OpenGIS® CityGML Encoding Standard (www.opengeospatial.org/standards/citygml and www.citygmlwiki.org ). CityGML is an open data model framework encoding standard for the storage and exchange of virtual 3D urban models. It is an application schema of the OpenGIS Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3) Encoding Standard (www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gml).

•    Web 3D Service (W3DS): The W3DS is designed as Portrayal Service and is a relatively new discussion paper issued by OGC. In its current form, it provides a 3D representation of the geographic data. The advantage of using visualization-centric formats is that they support a wide range of features for controlling the visual appearance (e.g. textures, surface properties, animations, lighting, atmosphere) and that they can be more efficiently transmitted and encoded.

•    GeoRM: To enable providers of geospatial content and services to tailor offerings that implement the policies of the providers and their users, the OGC’s Geo Rights Management (GeoRM) Domain Working Group has developed a framework of geospatial rights management standards for purchasing, managing, and protecting rights to digital geospatial content. (See Figure 4.) The Geospatial Digital Rights Management Reference Model (GeoDRM RM) is expected to result in OGC adopted interface and encoding standards. AECOO-1 sponsors and participants expect the GeoDRM RM to become a critical factor in solving the institutional obstacles to data sharing. Inefficient paper document traditions persist because accountability is important: Companies and agencies must be able to protect information and verify the existence of documents and documented conditions at specific points in time. GeoRM addresses this important business requirement. The requirement is also met by Web services implemented with document version controls and file formats that provide “the picture but not the data.”
 

•    Access control is a necessary complement to rights management. The OpenGIS Geospatial eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (GeoXACML) Encoding Standard defines a geo-specific extension to the XACML Policy Language 2.0 (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) Version 2.0), as standardized by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

•    Sensor Webs: The OGC’s “Sensor Web Enablement” (SWE) initiative has provided interface and encoding standards for Web services such as publish/discover, sensor tasking, encoding of observations & measurements, scheduling observations and subscribing to alerts from sensor systems. These standards will play a role in "smart buildings" that optimize energy use automatically as well as ensure the safety and comfort of occupants. Inside and outside of buildings, management of human-populated environments will depend increasingly on measurements and observations communicated using software interfaces and data encodings that implement SWE standards. (Read more on this topic here .)

Conclusion

Wise people in executive and management positions know that for the foreseeable future we cannot plan on easy money, cheap energy or cheap raw materials. We can plan on new carbon constraints, water constraints and green materials constraints. We can keep building, but we need to "build smart." That means introducing information technology, workflow analysis, energy flow analysis, and more cooperation into the way we use information to build and manage buildings. One thing we have going for us as we enter a difficult decade is that information technology continues to advance, along with knowledge about how businesses and their business partners can use technology to optimize business processes.

Capital projects involve partnering and increasingly this will mean partnering with public planning and public safety officials as well as large and small design and construction contractors who may be nearby or half way around the world. They WON'T all be using the same proprietary BIM solutions. Global consensus standards activities are the best way to optimize information technology for a future in which we know we will partner with partners we may not know now.

Consensus standards activities also provide an opportunity for organizations with a particular interest in integrating Building Information Modeling and sustainability. Standards can, for example, ensure that encodings and product cataloging systems for building components enable comprehensive capture and discovery of information about "green content."

BIM progress involves bringing a large number of stakeholder groups into a standards process to gather requirements and agree on common interfaces, schemas and best practices that enable interoperability. Key members of the AECOO community are sponsoring the AECOO-1 Testbed to take advantage of the OGC’s experience in running such a process and to benefit from other OGC standards initiatives whose work products will be useful as the bSa begins its work to align AEC industry information technology and information pathways. Both organizations will report AECOO-1 results in early 2009 and invite comment and additional participation. They invite AECOO stakeholders to bring their requirements into the OGC to be addressed in what is expected to be an ongoing series of AECOO testbeds and interoperability experiments. 


Louis Hecht is director, Business Development, at the Open Geospatial Consortium; e-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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