Benefit from BIM as a building physicist or fire safety planer

I remember a project with BIM - for the architect, it was one of the first with BIM and he was super motivated. He told the building physicist and fire safety planner.

"Don't worry you don't have to work with BIM, just give me the information and we populate the model with it."

Guess what happened, first the architect managed to put the information in the model, but soon he was late with his work and stopped doing the work for others. More generally speaking, the main challenges for building physicists and fire safety planners are that they:

• Don't get the models in time for their conceptual work. Therefore they often stick to the old workflow of producing colored conceptual plans - without linked information - and a very manual process.
• Don't get the models of the necessary quality. E.g., an architect will model one corridor wall from a fire safety perspective, this wall has different properties depending on the neighboring space.
• Don't get paid enough to update ever-changing designs constantly.
• Linked databases to enrich the architect's model can be intransparent and failure-prone.

We did think a lot about ways for fire safety planners and building physicists to still benefit from BIM and even automate their work. I put down these thoughts in this article, hoping to continue refining them with you as specialists.

The primary hypothesis is that modeling in one of the standard BIM tools is overkill, and we need to find a workflow that builds on top of the architectural BIM. Overkill I mean in terms of licensing and training costs.

Sketching a solution

Getting the models in the wrong quality and at the wrong time can be easily solved with the automatically generated abstractBIM. The minimal modeling requirements for the architect are:

• An IfcSpace element - the emptiness between the building elements and something architects can easily model with a click of a button in most BIM tools.
• The door and window elements.
• A proper exported IFC model of these elements e.g. with a model view definition called coordination view.

Having this abstractBIM model, we still need to find ways of enriching it with the necessary information. The goal is to create a requirement model and communicate the requirements to the architect so that he can plan accordingly. Once the design stabilizes, the architect can bring the necessary information into his model.

• Doing this manually in a BIM modeling tool e.g., Archicad, Vectorworks, Revit, SketchUp, could be an option. The advantage is that it's easy to generate plans based on the information. The disadvantage is, that it's manual and time-consuming. Especially when the design changes, the work needs to be repeated.
• Another option is using IFC editing tools like SimpleBIM and probably Desite (Although I don't know Desite enough to know how to do it) to enrich the architect's IFC or abstractBIM.
• The third one is to automate the enrichment based on recipes. A recipe is a collection of rulesets. E.g. All walls around a staircase have an EI90 fire safety requirement. To make this feasible the wall needs to know precisely between which two rooms it is - and in the abstractBIM there is this information available. The platform to manage the recipes is in development at www.abstract.build

We created the first prototype for a standard multi-family building in Switzerland, and with just 30 rules, we could define all the necessary qualities. Therefore we know we can bring the information into the BIM and send it to the architect.

Data visualization for communication and quality control is key

Now we need to find a way to check the data and visualize the information as conveniently as with the fire safety plans.

To visualize the information, I recommend BIMcollab ZOOM's smart views. The beauty is, that once they are defined, they can be reused in different projects and just sent to the architect. The architect can install the free version of BIMcollab ZOOM and with a quick explanation, they can visualize the information. So far, this is very convenient for the day-to-day work, but I assume the latest for the building permit, plans need to be made. I don't know which tool to recommend for this. Archicad could be an option; it's excellent for creating colored views based on attributes and has a good IFC import. SketchUp could be an option as well but needs some more manual work.

The other aspect is quality control. Did the architect understand the information correctly, and did he translate the requirement model accurately to his architectural model? Checking plans is cumbersome. Again, a visual control with BIMcollab ZOOM's smart views could be a good option for smaller projects. The other possibility could be a Solibri ruleset to compare the requirement model and the architect's BIM. That's doable but needs some more thought, especially regarding standardizing the process across projects.

What are your thoughts? Are you interested in joining efforts and doing some tests together? PN me!