buildingSMART alliance January 2013 Challenge

by Bill East, PhD, PE - Engineer Research and Development Center, U.S. Army, Corps of Engineers

Executive Summary

Information exchange standards developed by buildingSMART chapters are intended to streamline the delivery of building information through the life of a capital project. The buildingSMART alliance Challenge events allow software companies to publically demonstrate their ability to meet these standards. Challenge criteria require that software companies produce and or consume the required information exchanges and provide sufficient configuration information to allow software users to repeat this process on their own projects.

Scope

The buildingSMART alliance January 2013 Challenge will focus on the definition of building requirements, the delivery of that information thru design and construction, and the delivery of handover information to the facility manager. Three specifications for contracted information exchanges: Construction-Operations Building information exchange (COBie), the Building Programming information exchange (BPie), and the HVAC information exchange (HVACie) will be exercised as part of this challenge.

BPie

The Building Programming information exchange (BPie) is a refinement to the buildingSMART alliance's Life-Cycle information exchange project at the architectural programming project stage. BPie is a joint project between buildingSMART Norway and buildingSMART alliance that specifies the minimum required set of objects and associated property sets typically found in room and equipment data sheets. BPie will review the contents of all prior international and national projects to develop a single, non-proprietary specification. The specifications for BPie will be published in March 2012.

COBie

The Construction-Operations Building information exchange (COBie) delivers building asset information. COBie provides a vendor-neutral interchange format that allows building asset information to flow without the multiple stages of rediscovery and rekeying required today. COBie is part of an international data exchange specification called the Industry Foundation Class (IFC) Facility Management Handover Model View Definition (MVD). The internationally recognized version of the FM Handover and COBie, version 2.4, will be the required format for the delivery of the needed building information.

Since the first Challenge event in 2008 COBie has become established in both the United States and the United Kingdom were, particularly in the sectors where building owners are required to manage their projects over their entire life, COBie is increasingly found in design, construction, and commissioning contract requirements. Currently the United Kingdom has taken the lead in COBie adoption by requiring all public contracts over 5M GBP to deliver COBie data sets.

HVACie

Under a joint project between the buildingSMART alliance, ASHRE, and the Engineer Research and Development Center a specification for the open standard exchange of HVAC system design information has been developed. This specification captures the needed information to define the three major components of HVAC systems: hydronic fluid system, heat transfer equipment, and thermal distribution system. The specifications for BPie will be published in March 2012.

Approach

The January 2013 Challenge will demonstrate the specification and delivery of building asset information from the design team (including both Architectural and MEP) to the contractor, and from a contractor through commissioning, to facility management handover. These demonstrations will be accompanied with a series of quality control and quality assurance analysis that will (1) evaluate the success of commercially available software products to meet performance-based specifications for contracted information exchanges, (2) to quantify the areas of manual effort needed to fix the data provided when the software fails to meet contract requirements, and (3) to extend the current set of benchmark models and guides upon which practitioners can recreate the steps followed by both the software companies and the QC/QA team.

The ultimate objective is to objectively demonstrate ability of different commercially available software products to produce and/or consume the specified information outside the context of hands-on vendor demonstrations. The quality of the information is defined in this Challenge as the consistency of the building information provided in computable format with that found in the equivalent stage of related contract drawings. This will enable those writing contracts and those attempting to fulfill contract requirements that the results of the Challenge event may be repeated on real projects.

This Challenge will also require software vendors to limit IFC-based information exchanges to the precise set of information needed for each of the specified information exchanges: BPie, COBie, and HVACie. This may require software vendors who only provide an export for the IFC Coordination Model View to filter out information unneeded by the deliverables specified in this Challenge.

Software vendors shall utilize only software that is scheduled to be commercially available on or before January 2013. Vendors shall be required to provide detailed mapping information to ensure that software users are able to exactly reproduce the results demonstrated in the Challenge.

Requirements

1. To accommodate available time to complete the Challenge, this Challenge shall be broken into parallel tracks, the programming/design track and the construction/commissioning track. The Medical Clinic model (ZIP), part of a series of test files referred to as the Common BIM Files shall be used for both the design and construction challenges.
2. Design software shall use the information currently available for the Medical Clinic Model to create IFC deliverables in Step Physical File Format conforming to the FM Handover MVD. Design software vendors that do not currently export the FM Handover MVD shall be required to either create a new Model View export or internally provide a filter of existing MVD exports to eliminate entities not required by the FM Handover MVD. BPie deliverables shall be a sub-specification of the FM Handover with the additionally required properties noted in the BPie specification.
3. The COBie Responsibility Matrix (XLS) defines all required mappings from IFC to COBie spreadsheet formats. Vendors exporting both IFC-based and and COBie spreadsheet formatted information shall be required to ensure the information contained in both of these formats exactly matches the requirements specified in worksheet three of the responsibility matrix.
4. The Medical Clinic model contains a complete set of redacted design drawings (ZIP). These drawings shall be the basis for the Challenge.
5. Business rules specifically identified in the information exchange specifications, such as those found in the FM Handover MVD specification, shall be enforced by producing software. Such constraints, in the example of the FM Handover MVD specification, are shown, but are not limited to the list below:
   1. Design files shall classify Space, Type, Zone, and System records.
   2. Construction files shall have design file classification and shall classify Contact records.
   3. Spaces shall be grouped by Zone.
   4. Components shall be grouped by System.
   5. All Components shall be placed within the space they occupy or the space from which the component is operated.
   6. Attributes of products and equipment shall be accomplished at the Type level. Duplicate properties on instance objects shall not be allowed.
   7. Attribute Values of Spaces and Types shall carry through from BPie to COBie exchanges.
   8. Units shall be provided for each Attribute.
6. Additional quality constraints shall include
   1. Allowed properties in building information models shall reflect the set of information found on the design drawing schedules and those properties found in the Specifiers' Properties information exchange (SPie) ProductGuide.
   2. Properties whose values are unknown shall be identified as "n/a."
   3. Building information model content shall identify every products and equipment found in design drawings schedules.
   4. Building information model content shall match placement of equipment within spaces identified in design drawings and/or related schedules.
7. The construction/commissioning challenge shall have as an option the consumption an existing Clinic COBie Design file (ZIP) when this file has been updated to reflect the Building Programming information exchange content.
8. The expected outcome of the construction/commissioning challenge shall reflect the natural progression of product selection, installation, and commissioning as shown in the Clinic COBie Facility Management Handover file (ZIP) plus those carry-thru properites identified in the Building Programming information exchange content.
9. This challenge will not consider information on the COBie worksheets either through design or construction/commissioning: COBie.Assembly, COBie.Connection, COBie.Coordinate, COBie.Issues, COBie.Impact.

Schedule and Milestones

Coordination Meetings

1. Separate calls shall be held for the programming/design and construction/commissioning tracks.
2. All meetings shall be accomplished utilizing a web based conference calling system. A toll-free number shall be provided for those in the Continental United States.
3. All calls shall be held 1000-1200 Central Time Zone Thursday mornings. This timing allows participants from Europe and the Continental United States to participate during normal business hours.
4. All files shall be exchanged through the buildingSMART alliance portal system. Access to the portal shall be provided based upon notification of participation.
5. buildingSMART alliance portal system provides for the private exchange between implementers and quality control/assurance team.

Results

The results of this challenge will be published on the buildingSMART alliance website under "Means and Methods" pages similar to that found for the COBie project.

All software producing specified data will receive a quantitative evaluation for its performance that reflects the time required to manually correct differences between the delivered and expected information.

All software products consuming specified data will receive a quantitative evaluation for its performance that reflects the time required to manually enter missing information.

Standardizing the Challenge

The January 2013 buildingSMART alliance Challenge is the first in the series of annual events to be held as part of the National Institute of Building Sciences Annual Conference. As part of this Challenge a standard set of guidelines will be developed for use by all future Challenge events. These guidelines, once completed, will be submitted for formal balloting to the National BIM Standard-US.

Participation in Informational Meetings

Submit your request to participate in the first informational meetings via email to nibs@nibs.org subject "buildingSMART alliance 2013 Design Challenge" or "buildingSMART alliance 2013 Construction Challenge".