Between the Poles

Adoption of horizontal BIM, heavy BIM, VDC, civil information modeling, BIM on its side, and BIM for infrastructure

Horizontal BIM, heavy BIM, VDC, civil information modeling, BIM on its side, or BIM for infrastructure are terms used in the construction industry for  the application of model-based technologies and processes to non-building projects. This includes infrastructure for dams, waste facilities, rail, transit, aviation, energy, public parks and recreation, bridges, roads and highways, and water and wastewater.  The term vertical BIM is often used to differentiate BIM for buildings. 

BIM has achieved incredible penetration in the vertical market.  The latest McGraw-Hill Construction report Business Value of BIM in North America 2012 reports that overall Adoption of BIM has increased from 17% in 2007 to 71% in 2012, which represents 45% growth over the last 3 years.

A recent McGraw-Hill SmartMarket Report The Business Value of BIM for Infrastructure suggests that BIM is beginning to significantly impact the infrastructure construction industry.  High/very high use of BIM for infrastructure projects among owners, contractors, and A/E firms was only 16% in 2009.  In 2013 it has reached 52%.    In 2009 73% for firms reported no or low use of BIM on infrastructure projects.   In 2013 only 21% of firms report low or no use of BIM.

One of the most important findings of the research is that firms involved in vertical BIM projects in the past are more likely to use BIM for infrastructure as well.  The report finds a positive correlation between BIM penetration in the vertical market and BIM use for infrastructure.  McGraw-Hill suggests that the result will be that BIM adoption in the horizontal market will occur at a  faster rate than the rate of adoption of BIM in the vertical market. It is interesting that contractors followed closely by owners are leading high/very high adoption of BIM.

Some of the interesting findings of the report are

• Almost half (46%) of the firms surveyed report using BIM on their infrastructure projects, up from 27% two years ago.
• The percentage of those using BIM on more than 50% of their projects is expected to grow from 30% now to 52% in just two years.
• 79% of current non-users of BIM feel positively about future adoption of BIM, with only 4% actually opposed.
• 67% of all users report a positive ROI on their BIM investments, even higher than the 63% of BIM users for buildings who reported the same in 2009.

Benefits of BIM for Infrastructure

The top benefits reported for BIM for infrastructure are

1. lower project risk and better predictability of project outcomes (60%) as a top benefit in the next five years
2. reduced conflicts and changes (58%)
3. improved project quality (48%)

Adoption of BIM for infrastructure projects

According to the McGraw-Hill report on BIM in North America many organizations have been using BIM on vertical building projects for a number of years.  The infrastructure report finds that the  adoption of BIM for infrastructure projects lags BIM for buildings.  According to McGraw-Hill the use of BIM for infrastructure is about three years behind its use on vertical projects.  As evidence McGraw-Hill has compared the length of time firms have used BIM for infrastructure to that for
building projects reported in McGraw-Hill Construction’s 2009 BIM SmartMarket Report.

Years using BIM: 1–2 Years

2012 Infrastructure: 50%
2009 Buildings: 48%

Years using BIM: 3–4 Years

2012 Infrastructure: 27%
2009 Buildings: 28%

Using BIM more than 5 years
2012 Infrastructure: 23%
2009 Buildings: 24%

Benefits of BIM for Infrastructure

Top business benefits for A/E firms

• Marketing new business
• Reduced erroors in documents
• Offer new services
• Better project outcomes
• Better project outcomes
• Maintain repeat business
• Improved learning for younger staff
• Reduced rework

Top business benefits for contractors

• Better project outcomes
• Marketing new business
• Reduced rework
• Offer new services
• Reduced errors in documents
• Improved learning for younger staff
• Maintain repeat business

Top business benefits for BIM for infrastructure for owners

• Better project outcomes 44%
• Reduced rework 44%
• Fewer claims/litigation 38%
• Reduced errors in documents 33%
• Reduced workflow cycle time 33%
• Reduced project duration 33%
• Reduced construction cost 22%

Using GPUs for compute-intensive geospatial applications

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee was names the fastest computer on Earth in November 2012, according to the Top500 list.  Most of Titan’s computing capacity comes from its NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators. Based on the same architecture used in NVIDIA’s workstation and PC gaming chips, the GPU accelerators perform computations far more power efficiently than any machine equipped with CPUs alone.

Mapping tweets in real-time

I blogged recently about TweetMap which is an instance of MapD, a massively parallel database platform being developed through a collaboration between Todd Mostak, (a researcher at MIT), and the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA).  The database can be queried by time, space, and keyword.  The ultimate objective is to be able to query billions of tweets live in real-time.  In this case real-time means from tweet to tweet on a map in under a second.  MapD is a general purpose SQL database that can be used to provide real-time visualization and analysis of very large data sets.  MapD uses commodity Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to parallelize compute intensive tasks such as querying and rendering very large data sets on-the-fly.  MapD runs on inexpensive hardware  with four GPUs ( ~$1000).

Flood modelling

At the HxGN conference in Las Vegas last week, I came upon Myriax Software Pty Ltd, which is a private startup and  which has developed EonFusion Flood, which is a hydrodynamic modeling package based on a 4D GIS which can run both 2D grid and 3D particle-based hydrodynamic simulations.  This is very compute-intensive stuff and I expected that this was running in the clud on some parallel processing machine.  It turns out it was running on a single GPU on a laptop.  Fllod can be used for river and floodplain modeling, dam break scenarios, designing spillways for dams, and urban flood risk assessment.

Time required to create 3D city models dropping rapidly

At the HxGN conference in Las Vegas today, there were some very interesting new technologies.

Juergen Dold, President of Hexagon Geosystems, showed some images from a recent project in Zurich West, where the Zurich suburb was flown Monday and the finished 3D model was available by Friday.  The model does not have intelligence.  Basically it's  a massing model with photorealistic texturing, but for many applications especially for visualization, that is really all that is required.

Dold said that they expect that it will be possible to get this down to hours.

Infrastructure excellence competition

Infrastructure-excellence.com is hosting the second annual competition showcasing Excellence in Infrastructure— highlighting the best projects done in 2012/2013. The winners will be given over US$10,000 in prizes by the competition sponsors.  The competition is open to anyone 21 years and older who is planning, designing, building, and managing infrastructure projects.  Project types may include the following:

• Transportation (roads and highways, rail, airports, or bridges)
• Land development (commercial sites, subdivisions, public parks, or recreation)
• Water (distribution, water resources, dams and levees, or wastewater)
• Energy (electric and gas distribution, electric transmission, and substation design)
• Urban planning

SPAR 2013: Developing an intelligent 3D model of above and below ground infrastructure for the City of Las Vegas

At SPAR 2013 Keith Warren, BIM/3D SUE Manager at VTN Consulting gave a fascinating presentation on the 3D above and below ground model of city infrastructure including roads, utilities, telecom, and buildings that VTN has developed with the City of Las Vegas.  Keith believes that at the present time Las Vegas' 3D city infrastructure model is unique in North America.

This model also represents a classic example of the benefits of convergence, the integration of engineering design data including building information models (BIM), geospatial data including digital terrain models, high resolution photogrammetry, and point clouds derived from laser scanning, together with 3D visualization technology.

Education

About five years ago the City of Las Vegas approached VTN because they saw some potential value in 3D modeling.  At that time the city had had little experience with 3D modeling.  VTN has a broad range of in-house capabilities spannng engineering (traffic, public works, and 3D subsurface utility engineering), survey including laser scanning, GIS, building information modeling, and visualization.  Over the next two years VTN focused on education, working with the city and other utility agencies to introduce them to 3D modeling and visualization technology.  VTN organized workshops with the city, local utiltiies including the water district, and other public agencies to educate them in some of the capabilities of the new technology.  At the same time they worked with the city and other public agencies to understand the problems they were facing.

Challenge: subsurface utility engineering (SUE)

One of the problems that was identified repeatedly in these workshops, not only at the City but also at the utilities, was hitting underground infrastructure during excavations.  According to national statistics, in the United States an underground utility line is hit on average every 60 seconds.  The total cost to the national economy is estimated to be in the billions of dollars.  The problems is that in most municipalities in North America, for years underground utility lines have been put in the ground not according to plan but wherever it has been easiest and cheapest to build them.  In addition 2D as-builts of underground infrastructure are unreliable.  The result is that in most municipalities the location of underground utiltiies is very poorly known.  This was the situation in Las Vegas.

Since the city had been educated on 3D modeling technology by VTN, they decided that this technology could provide a solution for the problem of locating underground utilities.  The City decided to go ahead with a project to model one and half miles of Main Street in the older part of Las Vegas.  The project was intended to model below and above ground facilities including roadways, utilities and telecommunications, and buildings.

The project also specified implementation of a new low distortion geospatial coordinate system to make it possible to support engineering grade accuracy for geolocating infrastructure.

Reality capture

Buildings were modeled in several ways, including extruding a building footprint from a GIS, using building models from the Sketchup 3D Warehouse, laser scanning existing structures, and complete BIM models for newer buildings provided by architects. 

A variety of techniques were used for reality capture of underground utilities and other infrastucture includng GIS, survey, design records, test holes, and ground penetrating radar (GPR).  Above ground utilities were captured by combining GIS data with mobile laser scanning. 

In the future to improve data quality for underground infrastructure, since the City owns most of the right of ways within Las Vegas proper (some is owned by the Nevada DOT), it has mandated that in the future contractors are required to use open trenching for utiities and all work has to be surveyed before the trench is closed. 

Intelligent city infrastructure model

The deliverable was a set of 3D models of all the underground and aboveground infrastructure and buildings for the one and a half mile corridor of Main Street in old Las Vegas.   Engineering design and other data was combined with the City's geoimagery, digital terrain models and other GIS data. The models were designed to run with the software that Las Vegas already had including Civil 3D, Navisworks, ESRI ArcGIS and Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler (Infraworks).

Augmented reality

Working with a partner VTN developed an application for the iPad that allowed underground facilities to be viewed virtually under the actual roadway.

Map-21 and Every Day Counts

Map-21 and Every Day Counts are Federal Highway Authority (FHWA) initiatives that are designed to encourage the adoption of 3D modeling.  MAP-21 (Moving ahead for progress in the 21st Century) requires 3D modeling and virtual construction and visualization technology for all eligible projects.  The Federal government will provide matching funding on projects using intelligent 3D modeling and visualization of up to 5% fo project costs.  The Map-21 initiative was announced last July, but it turns out that what Las Vegas has done is in Keith's estimation 80-90% compliant with Map-21 guidelines.

Every Day Counts is another FHWA initiative that encourages 3D modeling.  According to the FHWA 3D modeling in transportation construction allows for faster, more accurate and more efficient planning and construction. The FHWA foresees that as the benefits are more widely recognized, many in the U.S. highway industry will transition to 3D modeling over the traditional two-dimensional (2D) design process.

Benefits of the intelligent 3D city infrastructure model

One of the major benefits that Las Vegas has experienced as a result of developing the intelligent 3D city infrastructure model is increased safety because of the reduced risk of unexpectedly hitting underground utilities especially hazardous ones like gas mains. 

The benefits of being able to accurately locate existing underground infrastructure are immense.  They include automated clash detection to identify potential problems when plannng, designing and constructing new undergound infrastructure.  Also there are reduced operating costs because of reduced truck rolls for cable/pipe locate operations. 

Overall the City has found that the 3D model approach provides more information per dollar invested, in other words more capabilities at lower cost.

SPAR 2013: Integrated geospatial, LiDAR and design datasets for large infrastructure construction projects

Kevin Gilson, of the Project Visualization group at Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), gave an overview of how PB manages 3D+ datasets in support of design and construction for large infrastructure projects such as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the I-95 New Haven Harbour Crossing /Q-Bridge reconstrcution, and the Alaskan Way viaduct project.  He showed how the project visualization team leverages geospatial data, LiDAR data, design data and construction planning data together in large integrated datasets that concurrently support visualization, stakeholder communication, design, construction planning and site logistics.

PB has more than 30 staff dedicated to project visualization.  That included folks who do 3D modeling, design visualization, web design, and programming.  3D technologies include building information modeling (BIM), 3D design, virtual desgin and construction (VDC) and laser scanning (LiDAR).

3D modeling for design and construction

Some of the reasons that designers and construction firms are adopting 3D technology are the serious limitations of 2D sheet sets, still legally required fro s-builting but very unreliable, the design efficiencies of 3D parametric models, and the limitations of siloed project data.  PB has adopted the concept of project information models or PIMs, that integrate information about all aspects of the design and build process and that potentially can flow data through for operations and maintenance.

3D modeling and model-based design are used by PB for design validation, clash detection, and parameteric modeling, civil integration management, 4D modeling (time+3D), 5D (cost+time+3D), and design visualization.  Model-based design involves integrating CAD, GIS, survey, analytics, BIM and associated databases, and 3D visualization typically in a vitual gaming environment.

Construction firms in particular see tremendous advantages in 4D models that integrate design and gespatial data and allow the construction team to virtually build the project so that they can check staging and construction sequencing and site logistics virtually.  5D and higher dimensions allow them to add additional metrics including cost, resources, materials, and equipment.

The benefits that PB realize by this integrated approach based on 3D+ dataest include finding and fixing conflicts between different design groups (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, structural, and so on) during the design phase rather than during construction when clashes are much more expensive to fix.  Another benefit is being able to quantify things using analytics, so  that decisions are data-driven rather than subjective.

A major benefit is less re-work is required reducing the risk of cost and schedule overruns.  A big advantage is improved communication and coordination between all project stakeholders, and especially with non-technical decision makers.  Being able to see photorealistic visualizations of what the project is going to look like makes a huge difference in communicating with politicians and the public.  PB uses gaming technology making it possible to experience a project before a shovel has gone into the ground.  For example, on highway projects, PB's visualization makes it possible to drive the highway and even the detours required during construction in a virtual environment so that the public can experience the changes and be prepared for them before they actually happen.

Another important benefit that Kevin sees from a project approach that includes visualization is that "sexy deliverables" get peoples attention, within the project team as well as with external stakeholders.  Several other speakers at SPAR 2013 also emphasized the importance of the "sexiness" factor.

Laser scanning in construction

Kevin described a number of applications of laser scanning (LiDAR) as part of the 3D constrcution process.  A major application of LiDAR is contruction monitoring, capturing construction progress as well as being able to automate the process of checking for divergence from design when contractors for a variety of reasons don't build what is designed. 

Another important Laser scanning application is accurate and reliable as-builts.  At SPAR 2013, speaker after speaker in different sectors of the construction industry reiterated that current 2D as-builts, still legally required, are unreliable and rarely looked at by anyone post-construction.  Marco Vidali Castillo at ICA which is responsible for the Autopista Urbana Sur project in Mexico City  gave an example of how trying to use 2D as-builts can lead to problems necessitating major re-engineering.  LiDAR scans of a completed project can provide the reliability that 2D as-built sheet sets lack.  On the Autopista Urbana Sur project Marco says that ICA intends to deliver LiDAR scans as well as the legally required 2D as-built sheet sets.

3D modeling and sustainability

There are also benefits from the perspective of sustainability to PBs project approach. Collaboration typically has relied on the exchange of paper documents which on a large project can involve many thousands of paper documents.  Collaborating in a virtual environment can dramatically reduce paper flow while improving the quality of communication.  It can also improve traffic flow and resource management during construction, thereby reducing emissions. A life-cycle approach to data management during design and construction, with data being reused for operations and maintenenace can reduce rework resulting in significant efficiencies.  

Selecting software tools

The PB project visualization team takes a best of breed approach in selecting software for 3D modeling and visualization. An important criterion in selecting tools is interoperability between the different technologies.  Currently the software stack that PB relies on includes

Geospatial

• ESRI
• Global Mapper
• Infraworks (Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler)

CADD

• Microstation InRoads
• AutoCAD/Civil 3D
• Solidworks

Visualization

• 3ds Max
• Sketchup
• Realtime - UDK, Unity

Collaboration/4D

• Navisworks

SPAR 2013: BIM + GIS based facilities management at Denver International Airport

At SPAR 2013 Dennis Rodriguez, Project Manager at Denver International Airport (DIA), and Daniel Stonecipher of Immersiv, gave a fascinating presentation on how they combined a BIM-based design and construction process with GIS  to create a facilities and operations management (FM/OM) solution for managing DIA's infrastructure.

DIA is a small city and managing its infrastructure involves many of the same probelms that utilities and municipal governments have to deal with.  As-builts are unreliable or not existent,  which meant that DIA really didn't know reliably where their assets were.   DIA has nine million CAD files which meant a major data management problem.  Their maintenance program  was dysfunctional because they didn't have the information they required to rationalize it with a data-driven process.  They had a lot of redundant data because of silos of information in different departments using different applications.  The most important impact of all of this was subjective decision making during the budget planning process, characterized by the so-called HiPPO (highest paid person's opinion) problem.

Their ultimate goal was data driven processes that supported predictive maintenance and objective metrics for decision making especially in prioritizing projects during the budgeting process.

The way they addressed this was by a combination of data normalization and business process rationalization.  The swiitched to an integrated building information management (BIM) design and construction process that produced a normalized data stream.  During design and construction the data that was required for facilities management and operations (FM/OM) was collected.  This involved collecting and validation existing data and developing continuous data and process management.  The result was FM/OM ready BIMs (both horizontal and vertical) and current relational data structures.

A critical aspect of their solution was that all data including BIM models was geolocated, which  made it possible to load all the data into a GIS linked to Maximo.  Geolocating all their facilities made it easy for them to organize maintenance work on different types of infrastructure concurrently, so that they could excavate once for multiple utilities rather than different crews reexcavating at the same location multiple times.

Dennis and Daniel said that a number of airports are interested in DIA's solution.  I would expect that universities, municipal governments,  and anyone who needs to manage infrastructure in a campus or municipal environment would find DIA's solution worthwhile investigating.

SPAR 2013: Digital highways require integrated engineering and geospatial data

At SPAR 2013 I had the opportunity to hear very forward looking presentations by Ron Singh, Chief of Surveys/Geometronics Manager at the Oregon Department of Transportation.  What Ron sees in the future and what motivates a lot of what Don sees needs to change in the highway construction process is autonomous vehicles, which will provide a major motivation for what Ron refers to as digital highways.

Automation over the last 25 years

If you look at the last 25 years there has been quite a lot of automation in the form of survey automation such as electronic data collection, GPS, and basic 3D laser scanning;  design automation such as computer aided design and drafting, and a bit of construction automation.  The primary focus has been on speeding up the project development process, but the end goal remains  2D paper construction documents.  Some people have been using what is called 2..5 D, a 3D roadbed prism with 2D objects on it.  In Ron's view the current way of designing and building highways has reached the end of it's lifetime and a complete transformation to a new paradigm is required.  The way Ron refers to this is standing the current process on its head and I blogged about it yesterday.  Fundamentally it involves intelligent 3D models replacing the current as-builts and a process that speeds up project development because it leverages existing engineering data rather that requiring a complete resurvey at the beginning of every project..

A new paradigm for intelligent highways

The objective is intelligent highways that will support autonomous and partially autonomous vehicles.  The new paradigm needs to be data-centric and real-time.  It will involve automated construction.   From a data management perspective it will require highway infrastructure lifecycle management, which will involve a very different approach to the survey/design/construct/maintain process that is currently used for highway projects in North America.

First of all, it will involve geospatially enabled 3D digital data. A key requirement is a low distortion geospatial coordinate system that will provide the foundation for geolocatiig all infrastructure including utilities.  It will require interoperability using industry standards for data exchange. Most importantly it will support a construction process that uses post-construction surveys to replace as-built plans with a full 3D engineered model that supports GIS/engineering data integration. 

It will require geospatially-enabled enterprise data management including version control and the ability to search for things geospatially.  It will provide tools for geospatially enabled asset management.  It will provide a framework for developing and maintaining engineering and geospatial data including 3D engineered models as well as scanned data for existiing structures for the entire life cycle of a highway.

Clearance calculation for substation design

I blogged previously about entegra, a company based in Germany that provides substation design solutions.  Entegra's substation design application is called primtech which has been optimized for  designing large substations.  It includes an extensible library of intelligent 3D objects such as power switches, transformers, isolators, insulators, chains, high-voltage cables, high-voltage pipes, foundations, steel structures, and terminals.  Last year I blogged about Primtech's support for lightning protection design.

The most recent major addition for substation designers is clearance calculation which is included in primtech 12.  Air Insulated substations require minimum distances between the different phases of live facilities as well as between live and grounded equipment. In addition minimum clearances are required between live facilities and surrounding fences and vehicle routes through the substation.  Primtech is now able to automatically compute these types of clearances according to the IEC 60071-2 standard.  

To do this requires a 3D CAD model of the substation and information for each piece of equipment indicating whether it is live, grounded, an insulator,  a fence or a vehicle route.  Based on this information primtech's Phase Checker automatically assigns each facility to the appropriate phase.  The phase checking also allows you to verify that all of the live conductors and other equipment are properly connected. 

Based on the 3D model and the phase assignments, all of the required minimum clearances for the whole substation can then be automatically computed.   Primtech is flexible in that it allows you to specify particular areas where you are interested in looking at clearances.  Primtech will then visually highlight the areas which do not satisfy the minimum clearances for phase to phase,  phase to ground,  phases to roads, phases to fences, phases to ground level, and insulators to ground level.  In addition to computing clearances, Primtech can also automatically perform collision detection to detect mechanical interferences between different pieces of equipment.

RICS BIM: Extending benefits of BIM to building operations and maintenance

At the RICS BIM National Conference 2013, Deborah Rowland, Head of Facilities Management, Government Property Unit, Cabinet Office in the UK Government outlined the Government's motivation and plans for a program to improve the post construction handover and operation of newly constructed buildings.  The motivation is clear.   Clients (meaning Government departments in this case) are not getting the assets and outcomes they expected.  Buildings are being designed and built that are found to be not fit for purpose by end users including being expensive both from a cost and carbon perspective to operate and maintain.

When it is realized that the cost of maintaining and operating a building over 20 years can be up to 30 times the original construction cost, it is clear that there are potentially very large long term benefits from such a program.  The effort put in up front on a project can have enormous leverage on the outcomes achieved. 

Government Soft Landings Policy

The Government Soft Landings (GSL) program is intended to rectify this and is designed to put in place a legal, contractual, and technical framework (based on the BSRIA Soft Landings Framework) including incorporating building information modeling (BIM) to fix the problem by ensuring continuity thoughout the buiiding lifecycle from inception, though design, construction, comissioning, training and handover through to operations and maintenance 1-3 years after handover.  Facilities management (FM) contracts are often for one year only so the 3 year horizon is designed to provide focus for the initial program implelentation.  Ms Rowland said that  in the future the intent is to extend it to the entire building lifecycle.

The Government Soft Landings Policy was agreed to by Government Construction Board in September, 2012 and will be mandated for all new central government buildings and large reburbishments (renovations) in 2016 in alignment with the BIM Level 2 mandate for design and construction of new buildings.

The guiding principle is that GSL will be a key element of the design and construction process.  It will require early engagement of the end user and the inclusion of a GSL champion during design and construction.  It also requires post occupancy evaluation and feedback to the design and construction team, and a concomitant commitment to post construction involvement from the design and construction team.  This process will require contractual agreements between the design/construction and FM teams.

GSL powered by BIM: The role of BIM in the GSL process

BIM is expected to facilitate the collaborative working of the design and construction and FM teams throughout the project.  The 3D BIM model will enable the FM team to experience the buildings from an operate and maintain perspective before the building is constructed to ensure that projected operational costs are maintained and the impact of changes on operations are assessed.  For example, in the case of the Ministry of Justice's Cookham Wood facility, the FM team was able to experience the building during the pre-construction phase and identify changes that would make maintenance easier and operations more efficient.

The  model is also expected to provide a fully populated asset data set for the CAFM (computer aided facilities management) systems and to reduce time wasted in obtaining information about assets including the cost of maintaining or replacing equipment.

The 3D model is also expected to faciliate planning modifications to building use and assessing their impact on operations.  After 10-15 years, typically, the building will require major renovations, and the traditional approach of inviting land surveyors to resurvey and remeasure is reconized to be inefficient.  A better process is envisaged in which an up-to-date BIM model maintained as part of ongoing operations and maintenance provides a basis for planning and designing renovations.

GSL Champion

A key role required by the GSL is the GSL Champion, who is envisaged as being critical to ensuring that a project meets client needs.  This is not seen as an additional cost or contractual role in the project, becaue the skills required already exist, typically within the real estate/facilities management group.  The GSL Champion's role is to act as a proactive voice for end users including faciltiies management.  The GSL Champion ensures that the appropriate metrics are in place to measure the quality of the facility from the perspective of the end user.  A critical responsibility of the the GSL Champion and one of reasons he/she needs to be involved during design and construction is to ensure that all of the data is incorporated into the BIM model to fully populate the asset register in the CAFM system.  The GSL Champion is also responsible for ensuring that the post occupancy evaluation and monitoring is undertaken.

Next steps for GSL

A BIM4FM industry group has just been setup, and its initial task will be to identify what FM needs in the BIM model it receives from design and construction.  Another important area of focus will be data standards for mapping COBie onto CAFM data models.  There are plans for developing procedures for BIM models for renovations for existing buildings and it is intended to extend the process to other infrastructure in addition to buildings (GSL for infrastructure).