BIM and Interoperability

This week we had to read Chapter 3 of the BIM Handbook, which discussed the various issues of Interoperability with BIM and how the industry was overcoming this speed bump. The first effort to create a universal format for interoperability was NASA in the post-sputnik era, from which Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES) was formed and is still widely used in the design and engineering community.. The handbook goes on to discuss the different kinds of exchange formats and the varying levels of complexity for each. The article spends a good amount of time discussing Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs) which can be most easily compared to libraries of objects in Revit.
The other article that I read this week was BIM Interoperability from the StructureMag website. The article was written in 2009 and discussed the future of BIM regarding interoperability issues and it was quite interesting to see how accurate the article really was. It stated that Interoperability would affect the rate of the Industry's transition to BIM but the transition is going to be inevitable and two years after the article was written, this statement is proving true. There are still a good deal of issues with the interoperability of BIM programs and related building programs for structural analysis, energy analysis, etc, but large steps have been made towards making a unified program that is able to perform all of the tasks necessary to for the design and construction of a new building. Autodesk has a large amount of programs that are able to perform many of the tasks needed for the design and analysis of a new building. Monika's example in class of how Revit Structure was able to take a building floor plan from Revit Architecture and be able to size the structural needs of the building was very interesting and showed us first hand just a small fraction of the capabilities of these programs.
One thing that crossed my mind this week while reading these articles was the video that Professor Mitchell showed us at the start of AE-390 with the Rocky Mountain Institute and how they have collaboration between the Architect, Structural Engineer, MEP Engineer, and everyone else involved with the design of a building right from the start of the design process so that buildings can be designed smarter. This process can be more easily adopted and executed much faster if interoperability were more prevalent and designers didn't have to recreate the same building multiple times in their program of choice.