BIM Giants: Firms enhance BIM/VDC with advanced collaboration tools [2014 Giants 300 Report]

This past April, more than 500 AEC professionals—many from Giants 300 firms—gathered in Boston for BIMForum. Now in its ninth year, the group, which is co-sponsored by AGC and AIA, brings together tech-minded professionals twice yearly to discuss how BIM/VDC tools and advanced workflows are being used to enhance collaboration of the Building Team. 

Of the 20-plus presentations at the Boston event, one stood out as being particularly indicative of emerging trends in the BIM/VDC field—namely cloud-based data sharing, rapid iterative design and analysis, and cross-discipline, cross-company collaboration.

In their presentation (http://tinyurl.com/BIMForumTT), Thornton Tomasetti’s Ben Howes and Matthew Naugle demonstrated how their firm is building specialized, cloud-hosted BIM models on select projects that enable rapid structural analysis and feedback for the architectural teams. 

As Howes and Naugle describe it, the model has the ability to share certain high-level inputs and outputs—including geometry rationalization, cost, and environmental and operational performance—with the design team. As designers make changes, the model reads the updated BIM data, runs the desired analysis, and then returns analysis feedback automatically—all without the need for exchanging full 3D models. The result is a near-real-time, iterative design process that greatly improves the conceptual and schematic design phases.

Giants 300 coverage of BIM brought to you by AGC of America www.agc.org.

“Iteration is great, but it can take too long,” said Naugle. “Using the cloud to connect the architectural and engineering teams, we’re able to extract information out of the model that’s relevant to each other and share it in real time.”

CUSTOM API DEVELOPMENT

Also at BIMForum, Stantec’s BIM R&D Leader Robert Manna demonstrated how the firm is enhancing its BIM solutions through the development of custom API-based applications. Its latest creation, PathFinder, automates the computation of walking distances and straight-­line distances between rooms in a BIM model. Developed in partnership with BIM consultant Boost Your BIM, the program enables Stantec’s design teams to analyze a proposed design within a few hours, versus days, said Manna. 

“Manually identifying these paths and measuring walking distances between hundreds of rooms would be a tedious, time­-consuming, and error-­prone task,” said Manna. The program is especially helpful on hospital projects, but could be used for designing airport terminals, classroom buildings, and labs, as well as for campus planning and life-safety applications, he said.

SOM’s Jason Chen, Senior Digital Design Specialist, and Sebastian Claussnitzer, Architectural Designer, previewed the firm’s integrated data model approach for early-phase collaboration between architectural, structural engineering, and sustainable engineering teams. Using custom scripting, the firm can link and share numerous project data sources—from spreadsheets and early project models to spec sheets, drawings, and performance analysis—between multiple team members. 

“There’s data everywhere, but it doesn’t work well with everything,” said Chen. The key is to have the most up-to-date data on every facet of the project to feed an iterative design process. For example, SOM’s enclosure and core design teams can each work in their tool of choice and cooperatively develop a single information model for a project. By accessing the same model, the different disciplines can impart their knowledge to the model, simultaneously informing and enriching the design, according to Chen and Claussnitzer.

For more on the BIMForum Boston event, including videos and abstracts of the presentations, visit: http://bimforum.org/2014/04/28/boston-bimforum-presentations-2.

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