FM Handover Aquarium and COBie2 Challenge

On Dec 8, 2009, Bentley successfully participated in the ‘COBie Challenge' at ‘ecobuild' in Washington, DC. This ‘Challenge' was part of the FM Handover Aquarium project, which is organized by the buildingSMART Alliance of North America and sponsored by the Engineer Research and Development Center of the US Army Corps of Engineers, the CAD Stelle Bayern, Staatliches Bauamt München (Germany) and Statsbygg (Norway).

‘FM Handover' Aquarium

buildingSMART Aquariums are projects to develop solutions for specific exchange requirements of ‘problem owners', such as the USACE, via IFC-compliant BIM applications. The ‘FM Handover' Aquarium is aimed at:

development of an IFC-based information exchange from architectural BIM to Facilities Information Management (CAFM and CMMS) applications,
refinement of COBie (Construction Operations Building Information Exchange) as COBie2 in order to internationalize and consolidate COBie as the receiving handover format.

‘Basic FM Handover' Model View Definition

The ‘Basic FM Handover' Model View Definition (MVD) specifies the required data and data formats that architectural BIM authoring applications must export to IFC-files and FM applications must import about a project, building, floors, zones, spaces and components. In addition to support of the ‘IFC2x3 Coordination View', the ‘Basic FM Handover' MVD requires export of base quantities and assignment of:

location to the project site (address, geographic location)
components (furniture, fixture and equipment) to spaces
spaces to zones
classification to spaces and components
manufacturer base properties to components
doors and windows to spaces

COBie2

COBie2 is an international open standard for the delivery of contractual facility operations, maintenance and management data to eliminate the need to capture information again and again during the project throughout the project life cycle. The information specified by COBie can be displayed in different formats, e.g. ifc (STEP), ifcXML (XML) and COBie2 spreadsheet (XML), which can be created from building information models directly or transformed back and forth with tools developed by AEC3 .

COBie2 Challenge

The COBie2 Challenge event in Washington, CD, on Dec 8, provided an opportunity for the software vendors participating in the FM Handover Aquarium to demonstrate the interims status of their product support for the FM Handover MVD and COBie2 format. From a test model, IFC files had to be exported before and after mandatory design changes. The IFC-files were then checked for compliance with the COBie2 format across 15 checking categories and transformed into a COBie2 spreadsheets.

Bentley Architecture

Considering it was only development ‘work in progress', Bentley Architecture performed very well indeed scoring already:

8 x EXCELLENCE COMPLIANCE
4 X GOOD COMPLIANCE
3 X ADEQUATE COMPLIANCE
0 x NON COMPLIANCE

During the challenge event, Bentley also gave a short presentation about our interoperability strategy and how support of the FM Handover MVD and COBie2 format is implemented in Bentley Architecture, i.e. by extending the Bentley Architecture workspace with the IFC 2x3 property sets (available from the SELECTservices download area under ‘Enhancements and Updates') and DataGroup definition files specific for the FM Handover MVD.

The next challenge is the buildingSMART certification of the FM Handover MVD scheduled for spring 2010, which will conclude the FM Handover Aquarium.