Real life BIM experience

Posted by Lars Bjørkhaug on Dec 11, 2007 in Blog | 0 comments

Thursday 6.th December The Norwegian Directorate of Public Construction and Property (Statsbygg) held a seminar about real life experience using IFC based BIM in projects. Of the 38 invited more than 65 met!, This proves that there is still a huge interest in experience from using buildingSMART technology in real projects in Norway. Among the participants where suppliers for IFC compatible software, members from the HITOS project team and project teams from upcoming projects both from Statsbygg and The Norwegian Defence Estates Agency (Forsvarsbygg) . The purpose of the seminar was partly to inform about experiences from using IFC in the HITOS project and partly to allow software suppliers to get direct feedback about their products and ideas for future improvements. Some issues still need attention and the most important was:

Current software lacks the possibility to properly filter information on export and import.

The current IFC exports of data doesn’t contain all information from the native format. Exporting and importing to the same application using IFC means loosing data. There was discussions about if this really was a problem or not.

There is a need for rapid implementation of IFD. Too much of the interoperability still depends on the naming of objects and properties making reuse of IFD models difficult in later phases.

All in all the experiences of using IFC in real life projects where positive. Most problems are related to bad implementations of the IFC standards and few are caused by shortcomings in the standard itself. Dealing with bad IFC support in software is all about giving constructive feedback from real projects to the software houses not so much about improving certification process or the IFC standard itself.