Solibri Model Checker allows you to perform quality control checks to your authored models utilising the industry open standard IFC before submission.
The construction industry is slowly moving from a very traditional, blinkered and adversarial world based on 2D transactions to an exciting and collaborative digital process fuelled by the Government BIM mandate in 2011. The Luddites are being dragged along kicking and screaming into this new age, into what is an alien concept for many of sharing data and information in a collaborative process using open standards. There is no going back!
It’s common knowledge that data is being generated at a quickening rate, data is everywhere around us, being collected, processed and utilised for use in almost every aspect of day to day life. Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, equivalent to 90 years of HD video, by using our mobile phones, searching on the internet or even creating a building information model (BIM)for use in construction projects
Data has a huge value, in the UK alone it is estimated at £54 billion per year, but of course data only has a value if it is correct. It is also estimated that the cost of incorrect data is costing businesses as much as 10% of revenue per year. Or to put that into figures in the US bad quality customer data costs businesses more than $610 billion a year. NASA lost the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter because one group of engineers used kilograms and metres while another group used pounds and feet.
What Exactly Is “Data Quality”?
It’s important to understand data quality and what that means and that can be broken down several ways.
Existence – does the data actually exist?
Validity – are the values used for the data acceptable?
Consistency – if the data is used in different locations or by different companies does it have the same values
Integrity – is the relationship between data elements and data sets accurate?
Accuracy – does the data describe the properties of the object correctly?
Relevance – is the data relevant in the first place?
So what does all this have to do in the BIM world? Geometric models and data models are being generated on every project, design models, fabrication models, asset information models alongside various data models that may exist in the geometric model or in an external database. The client should be dictating in their Employers Information Requirement (EIR) the data they require and at what stage.
This data may be generated automatically by authoring software, it may be imported from an external source and automatically tagged to elements in the model or it may be input manually. A simple example of bad data is a slab tool being used to model a wall and then manipulated to give the correct name. The geometric model looks correct, the 2D output (the drawing) looks correct, from the list above we can see that it exists, the values used for the data may be valid, but the accuracy and consistency will likely fail a quality control check. So does that matter? Well, that model is likely to be used by many other applications further down the line for example, for costing, and a slab modelled as a wall will give incorrect results. On its own it could be insignificant but if multiplied many times then it can cause a significant problem and an error in the tender costs.
How much quality control do you apply to your building information models? How do you manage the quality of the data? Part of a company’s brand and its reputation is the quality of their work. Yet the fact is many companies don’t even apply the same level of checking to their models (geometric or data) as they did to their 2D drawings putting their business and future prospects at risk and contributing directly to the impact on their bottom line, possibly even to the success or not of a project.
Solibri Model Checker allows you to perform quality control checks to your authored models utilising the industry open standard IFC before submission. Federated models can be clash checked against each other before performing more intelligent checks such as soft clashes, door openings, access heights. The model data can be checked and verified and almost any other user defined rulesets can be put in place as a company, project or industry standard. An example of this is the COBie extension and resources allowing checks at various data drops as well as visualisation of the data. Quality control is much more than just clash detection.
“The real value of Solibri is the ability to allow us to check a model based on custom rules. The software enables us to go much further than basic clash detection, from something simple like clash analysis against door swings, to clearance height void allowances where we have exposed MEP services.”
Nick Leach, Head of BIM, Multiplex Construction Europe Ltd
For more information, visit www.solibri.com
