Nicholas Nisbet, director of AEC3 and Technical Coordinator buildingSMART UKI asks how the BIM revolution will impact existing assets…
It’s widely held that we already have a very large proportion of the infrastructure, environmental and building assets that we will be using in 2025 and even in 2050. So how does the BIM revolution affect these?
If BIM means 3D models then we will probably not get much further than the shapes and images we find on Google Earth, OS and satellite scans. These give us the site and the size, but not the basements! If we are going to move towards managing our built assets holistically, we need to exploit all the information resources we can: maps, utilities, rateable asset data. Now that we have the networks and links to exploit them, projects like the National Housing Survey and the typology studies from the 1990’s have a real relevance.
AEC3 has been working with the Facility Managers of a District General Hospital to go to the next level of granularity. Gathering asset information was not easy: We have picked up the disparate schedules of accommodation, written appraisals and reports, energy meterage and brought them together to make what is a BIM in all but name. It doesn’t have much detail at the space and component level, but it does now have a lot of information both at the level of the fabric and MEP Systems and at the level of the departmental and functional Zones across the whole estate.
Amongst the challenges on the way, the need for common dictionaries is the most pressing: we needed a global dictionary for the many synonyms for objects (like Zones and Systems) and for their properties. In this project we are trialling the Dutch BouwCollege classifications of zones in terms of occupancy, access, loading and so on, as a short-cut to all sorts of implied characteristics. We are also trialling Uniclass 2015 Systems table, as indeed are our European partners. We also found we needed a local dictionary to cope with the huge variations in the naming of systems, circuits, storeys, departments that had arisen over decades of manual documentation.
We are now focussing on two departments, a ward and an out-patients’ clinic, so as to discover how much detail is needed to identify the appropriate upgrades to their fabric and MEP systems. We are starting to invite professionals to guestimate their recommended priorities and testing them in terms of cost and energy saving. Each suggestion will be tested, simulated and ranked, though we hope we won’t need to test all 4096 possibilities. The outcome should be a rational set of fundable priorities.
So let’s hear it for the PAS 1192 part 3 and the Asset Information Model!  And let’s hear it for European collaboration which is giving us the tools to manage a sustainable future.
Nicholas Nisbet
Director
AEC3 and Technical Coordinator buildingSMART UKI
+44 1494 714933
nn@aec3.com