3D Building Information Model
“It’s about much more than the technology, it’s about the very way in which we work and interact….”
Was the headline quote from the recent seminar entitled;
Design Management and
Building Information Modelling (BIM)
An event convened jointly between the CIOB Innovation and Research Panel, the CIOB Faculty of Architecture and Surveying and the Association of Researchers in Construction Management (ARCOM).
The “sell out” event was held on Wednesday 3rd June 2009, at Englemere, Ascot. More details of which can be accessed here.
Building Information Modelling (BIM) offers a fundamentally different paradigm for creating and sharing design information than its predecessor, technical drawing – whether hand or computer-aided. It promises to capture design intent; to enable exploration of multiple detailed design alternatives from the earliest stages of design, including analysis of commercial implications and engineering behaviour; to enable collaboration between disciplines; to make building designs accessible to building clients regardless of their technical skill; and to automate drawing production.
Any one of these, taken on its own, would mean significant shifts in the professional roles and responsibilities of all those involved in the design of buildings; taken together, they will make some roles entirely redundant, make others efficient to a point where fewer members of the profession will be needed, and generate the need for new skill sets that are likely to define new professional roles.
Thus it is that there is a growing movement in the architectural world to produce building designs as a BIM in 3D where all the information about each element including design, specification, cost estimate etc. is attached to that building element.
Once the building designer is able to harness this technology in full it is envisaged that the “turnround” time for the concept and schematic design phases for the design of a new building will telescope the design programme for new buildings dramatically.
At Lerch Bates we are presently engaged in constructing a generic Building Information Model (BIM) component for the vertical transportation elements of a building. This “building block” information will contain all the essential 3D structure of the lift shafts, lift pits, machine rooms and lift lobbies and will be exportable by applying IFC – the Industry Foundation Class (IfcWiki, 2009), a file format that is now a well establish standard, based on the latest International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) IFC 2×3 data exchange standard, compliant with ISO-10303-21.
The output model will be built using either data directly involved in the simulation process or automatically derived from the specification of the lift system chosen by the user, with most parameters exposed for further manual tuning. Once the final structure of the lifts, shafts and lobbies is decided, the information model may be easily and effortlessly fed forward to the architects using IFC file format.
The 3D structural model of the building is also used internally, by the 3D Visualisation Subsystem, which is part of our new visual simulation tool. This module, which is heavily reliant upon the 3D animation techniques used in the FreeWill+ animation framework (Szarowicz et al., 2005) provides a facility to observe the movements of passengers and elevator cars in the building. For more information about this aspect of our groundbreaking work click on Visual Simulation. Please contact us to learn more about the progress and availability of our BIM for vertical transportation.