Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the world will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure through 2030 to keep up with global GDP growth. This is a massive incentive for the construction industry to transform productivity and project delivery through new technologies and improved practices. McKinsey reports that large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. Construction productivity has actually declined in some markets since the 1990s and financial returns for contractors are relatively low and volatile. Construction has been slow to adopt process and technological innovations. R&D spending in construction lags most other industries - construction R&D is less than 1% of total industry revenue compared to 3.5-4.5 % in the auto and aerospace sectors. McKinsey & Company suggests that the construction industry is ripe for disruption and two of the technologies that it believes will be key in that anticipated transformation are geospatial and BIM.
The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital model will be during operations and maintenance, which typically represents 80% of the cost of a facility. Companies who take on design, build, and maintain and/or operate projects find significant benefits from a full lifecycle BIM + geospatial strategy. For example, EllisDon in Canada considers BIM+geospatial as best practice for its PPP projects, Rijkswaterstaat pioneered design, build, finance, and maintain (DBFM) projects in the Netherlands, Crossrail, which is currently the largest engineering project in Europe, has adopted this approach, Malaysian firm PESTECH International Berhad employs this approach for build, operate and transmit (BOT) projects, and major U.S. construction firm AECOM is applying BIM+geospatial on large design, build finance and operate (DBFO) projects. But to date there has been little reported quantitative evidence supporting the benefits of this approach. This is changing with several projects providing estimates of benefits including ROI of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction projects.
Integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
On many projects information provided by the construction contractor is handed over months after completion of the project. It can take the operator of the facility a year to go through this information to find the information required to operate the facility. This period is what is called the "blind spot" corresponding to the time the facility operator is managing the facility with limited information. Since for many types of equipment the highest probability of failure is in their first month or two of operation - just during the period that the building operator often doesn't have access to information about warranties and extended warranties - this increases the risk of equipment and even facility failures. In addition there is a cost associated with just finding the information required to service equipment. A NIST study across several industries estimated that the cost associated with this is 23 cents/square foot which adds considerable cost to operating the facility.
A full lifecycle facilities information flow starts with a facilities information specification from the owner identifying the building information to be included as part of the final deliverables at the time of commissioning. The facilities information specification is part of the contract between the owner and the designers and contractors who will construct the building. The facilities information required by the owner's specification are entered into the BIM database during design and construction by the designers and contractors. At the completion of construction the facilities information data collected by the designers and contractors and stored with the BIM model in digital form represents a key deliverable to the owner together with the BIM model. The facilities information can then be used to populate the building manager's asset management/facilities management system database including links to the BIM model of the facility to identify where each element or piece of equipment can be found. Most of the spatial and non-spatial data collected during construction is useful during operations. 100 % of floor plans and most of the 3D model (geometry and associated data) are needed in operations. Some owners find that just the BIM model including geometry and associated data is adequate for managing the facility. Others augment the BIM model by a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) which adds financial, occupancy, maintenance history and other information.
In an award winning paper at a 2011 conference organized by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial — or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century. The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time.
BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance. A leader in this space, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch transportation authority, began offering design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects a number of years ago which has motivated private Dutch engineering and construction companies to adopt an integrated geospatial+BIM approach to construction.
A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector realized a number of years ago that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance. For example, the firm Royal BAM Group nv/BAM Infraconsult adopted integrated BIM + geospatial because of market developments including more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project.
Geolocation plays a key role in integrating GIS and engineering data and applications for optimizing asset management workflows. One of the foundations for an integrated system of this type is Bentley's decision many years ago to geospatially-enable all of their products Bentley calls this capability geocoordination. It provides a location-aware foundation for workflows that require integrated engineering and geospatial data and applications.
Benefits of Integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle construction
Recently, Microdesk has reported case studies including hospitals, a medical research facility, an airport and a university. For each facility several use cases were included in the ROI analysis. For example, dealing with plumbing leaks, electric power shutdowns, passing on tribal knowledge from senior staff to new hires, and conducting infectious risk assessment (ICRA/PCRA), and so on. After introducing BIM models for facilities and asset management, FM staff were surveyed and asked whether they found dealing with a plumbing leak, for example, using BIM easier, the same or more difficult than the traditional approach. The analysis quantified the time required to resolve a plumbing leak before and after the introduction of BIM.
Two very interesting examples of the ROI analysis performed by Microdesk relate to maintenance operations in a hospital. Passing tribal knowledge on from the older generation of FM staff to the younger involves a junior FM staffer accompanying a senior staff member walking the building for about a month. This requires about 200 hours of staff time. The hospital hires about 12 people per year so this amounts to 2400 hours per year. With BIM and virtual reality (VR) this was reduced to 22 hrs per person, a very significant staff time savings. In another example, a review of infectious risk assessment (ICRA/PCRA) analysis in a hospital takes about 152 hrs and this has to be repeated 200 times per year. With BIM the time required to conduct these analysis was reduced to 74 hrs per review saving 15,600 hrs annually.
At the conclusion of five years running on the projects, the ROI analysis found a positive BIM in all cases, and estimated that introducing BIM for FM saved on average 5 % of operating costs per annum. It was estimated that introducing BIM reduced the time looking for things by 83% of the 23 cents per square foot cost for doing this from the NIST study. Since operations and maintenance are roughly 75% of the total cost of a facility, these results represents a substantial savings over the full lifecycle of a building.
BIM+geospatial interoperability
In the AEC world Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) are the open and neutral data format standard for the exchange of building information models (BIM) that is widely used in the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) sector. The IFC standard was developed and is supported by buildingSMART International. The IFC BIM standard is used in the construction industry in many countries and is mandated in countries such as Finland. The first versions of IFC were intended for buildings (vertical BIM). Recently buildingSMART initiated the IFC for Infrastructure project to extend the IFC standard to support linear transportation infrastructure (horizontal BIM or BIM for Infrastructure) such as rail, road, bridges, and tunnels.
In the geospatial world a widely used international geospatial standard for cities is CityGML. Thomas Kolbe and co-workers are the developers of the CityGML standard that has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Kolbe et al. are translating a vision of the city as an interactive system comprised of functional components, utility networks connecting components, and interdependencies between utility networks into standards-based intelligent models that can be used to analyze urban environments for a variety of purposes including risk- and disaster management energy consumption, carbon balancing and city life-cycle management.
Currently CityGML includes 3D geometry, topology, semantics, and appearance for urban environments. CityGML also supports a standard mechanism for adding extensions, called Application Domain Extensions (ADEs). There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains. For example, I blogged about a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE that was proposed for city utility networks. The INSPIRE Data Specifications Annex III contains use case encodings and a data model for Buildings the development of which was strongly influenced by CityGML. There have been attempts to integrate or at least develop a mapping between IFC and CityGML.
A major breakthrough in bringing the architectural and geospatial views onto a common footing is the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model developed by the OGC in cooperation with buildingSMART International and approved as an OGC standard in August, 2016. LandInfra was developed by Bentley Systems, Leica Geosystems, Trimble, Australian Government Department of Communications, Autodesk, Vianova Systems AS, and buildingSMART International and provides a unifying basis for land and civil engineering standards including the OGC's InfraGML and buildingSmart International's IFC for infrastructure standards.
buildingSmart International's IFC-Alignment project uses this common conceptual model of alignments for roads, railways, tunnels and bridges. The objectives of the IFC-Alignment project is to enable the exchange of alignment information through the full infrastructure lifecyle from planning through design and construction to asset management. On the geospatial side InfraGML is the OGC's application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities.
Open source support for AEC/geospatial interoperability
Where there are recognized open standards, there are more often then not open source projects supporting those standards. mago3D is a new open source 3D geo-platform. It is open source and integrates many well-known open source geospatial products and APis. The importance of this technology is that it shows that it is possible using the available open source, geospatial APis and tools - together with some genuine innovative development - to create an open, non-proprietary 3D geospatial platform for integrating geospatial and BIM. Given the critical importance of addressing the cultural and technical divide between the AEC and geospatial worlds, a viable open source alternative is essential for developing the innovative solutions to the challenge of interfacing the two worlds.
Bentley has announced that it intends to build its products supporting digital twins around an open source project already on Github called iModel.js. Bentley is committing its resources to developing an ecosystem around iModel.js. To quote Keith Bentley this is a huge change in direction for Bentley although Bentley had puts its toes in the open source water previously. Bentley used open source geospatial components to develop a new front-end for its leading road and rail asset management system AssetWise Lifecycle Information Management solution (ALIM). Bentley has also partnered with AGI to support the open source Cesium project.
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