Death by COBie?

On the subject of COBie

AEC Magazine caught up with Simon Gilbert of Solibri UK to discuss common issues surrounding the production of COBie and why it seems so painful for many

AEC Magazine: There is always a lot of complaining about IFC and COBie deliverables. Has IFC improved over the last five years?

Simon Gilbert: Yes, massively. I think the problem actually is back down to education, where people have to understand that it’s not just about IFC being a ‘File Save As’. It’s about a snapshot in time of a delivery, combining data and geometry, a project deliverable. If you think of it that way, you have to ask, ‘What are we delivering?’ It’s not just a file format; it’s a subset of data that users have to configure and understand. If users know what they are doing from a mapping point of view they can get really a good quality IFC file that can be used by other people with confidence in its consistency.

AEC: A lot of the complexity isn’t helped with the way certain popular products, like Revit don’t handle IFC properly.

SG: This is what we struggle with on a day to day basis. Many people really not understanding this. A common and basic problem is users can’t get the models in the same location, with the fudging that Autodesk has done on coordinates. I have to teach people who need to work with COBie how to get their models aligned.

Zoning is also an issue because Revit doesn’t understand the concept of containers and zones. They are created in Revit MEP, but they not in the Revit Architecture part. You end up doing the same work over and over again.

A system for Revit in the MEP is basically only pipe and duct services but, actually, in IFC a system is a collection of any objects, but you can’t create your IFC systems with anything else. So, you are absolutely jumping through hoops to try and get it to work. You can’t create property sets, you can only use the property sets that are inside Revit, which means they have to be mapped out to the right location. This means you end up with a disconnect between the properties inside Revit, against the properties inside the IFC file.

There are all these things that users need to understand. People aren’t using the right builds of IFC exporter, or they use the one straight out of the box. Some haven’t even

been updated to the latest patches of Revit. We’re talking absolute basics.

AEC: Do the customers actually know what COBie is?

SG: There are clients who ask for it but don’t really understand what they are asking for and were still in the educational process with people. Intrinsically many people want to stay as they are, they want to stay just providing their usual deliverables. It’s really hard. But then you do get customers that really understand exactly why you would be doing it, and what benefits it actually has and it makes sense. So, there’s no excuse to actually deliver it badly.

AEC: What’s the fix for the quality market?

SG: Policing and it’s got to come from the client end. The client needs to understand that it’s no longer acceptable to have a building which is apparently coordinated correctly and has some sort of data. They have to also understand when a model has been fudged in order to fix coordination issues. It’s about education of the clients to understand and to get more involved in what they are actually asking for, and what they’re demanding and making sure that they get those data dumps on the right dates.

AEC: What percentage of users do you think write decent COBie?

SG: A very difficult question. I don’t know to be quite honest. In virtually every project that we work on there’s usually a lot of misunderstanding. Saying that, the project I’m currently working on with an architect who’s delivering it for the contractor, is probably the closest that we’ve actually got to a true definition of COBie, as in the actual parameters are all named correctly, they’re all going to the right part of IFC.

The property sets are all correct, and they’re trying to do it correctly. Many people don’t even think about the naming convention for objects and just take the family name. In COBie your component sheet, your type sheet should be real world values. So, if you’ve got doors, for instance, the door should be the same name in the model as in the door schedule, so that you can look at a door schedule and identify the object that’s in the COBie datasheet. It has to make sense to people. People are just taking the defaults and using the COBie extension for Revit. First of all, they try and do it inside Revit, and then find out that what they’re doing is generating each individual delivery for architectural and MEP and somebody stitches the two Excel sheets together, which never works because they’re not using the same sets of data. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that you should be doing all this from a federated model. SG: People look at Solibri as a way to get good quality COBie; they want quality assurance. They need understand that quality assurance and the quality of their models actually starts right back at home. They then need to go through the process of understanding how bad their data is in the first place, how poor their modelling techniques are. Then you have to fix those and create a quality manual, a modelling standard for the whole office. Then, when models are created, they get good quality data and good quality geometry, which means Solibri can dynamically check it.

AEC: Sounds like in the future we might need Solibri to monitor in real time when people are creating BIM geometry?

SG: That is where it’s going, yes. We are also involved in two of projects with the Central Innovation Hub and Innovate UK. Here, we’re looking into the automated compliance for building regulations too.

AEC: With all the focus on 3D deliverables, lots of firms are looking to automate the 2D drawings and don’t want to be sucked into the traditional deliverables.

SG: What we need to do in the industry is change the delivery mechanism. We need to move away from 2D documents somehow, and actually just deliver quality model data, so that we can actually dump the 2D part completely, and actually move to real models and real data and real geometry.

‘‘ People aren’t using the right builds of IFC exporter, or they use the one straight out of the box. Some haven’t even been updated to the latest patches of Revit. We’re talking absolute basics ’’