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buildingSMART with COBIE: the Construction Operations Building Information Exchange

William Brodt1, E. William East2 and Jeffrey G. Kirby3

Prepared for the Government-Industry Forum: Engineering, Construction, and Facilities Asset Management: A Cultural Revolution, The National Academies, Washington, DC, October 31, 2006

BACKGROUND. Throughout each phase of the facility life-cycle information is created, transferred, augmented, and then typically lost. From an infrastructure owner’s point of view, the missing warranty, the lack of correct operating instructions, or not having a list of spare parts increase the cost to operate the facility. Missing information also impacts upon the ability of the facility to support the user’s requirements. Several years ago the Federal Facilities Council addressed the need to develop data standards for the exchange of building information needed by the facility maintenance and operations community.[1] Many benefits were identified at the symposium including improved customer satisfaction derived from proper maintenance. However, the attendees recognized that achieving the benefits would be difficult because considerable information about each piece of equipment to be maintained must be ferreted out of manufacturer’s literature and then re-entered into the maintenance database. Five years later, the Federal Facilities Council revisited this issue through a workshop which introduced a proposed model data exchange standard.[2] Subsequently, the National Institute of Buildings Sciences’ Facility Maintenance and Operations Committee began the process of testing the data exchange model. This model was contributed to the International Alliance for Interoperability and incorporated into the Industry Foundation Class (IFC) model in 2003, but was never implemented as a construction industry business practice.[3] COBIE. The Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE) builds upon the earlier work. COBIE is a buildingSMART initiative of the National Institute of Building Science’s Facility Maintenance and Operations Committee, the Facility Information Council, the International Alliance for Interoperability, and the National Building Information Model Standard. It is a federal government sponsored effort to support the development of Building Information Model(s) (BIM) via information exchange between the construction and operations phases. COBIE is sponsored by NASA and the National Science and Technology Council’s Physical Infrastructure and Security Interagency Working Group. It is being implemented by the U.S. Army Corps

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of Engineers’ Engineering Research and Development Center’s Construction Engineering Research Laboratory by the Project Extranet staff.[4] COBIE expects to transform the practices for gathering and assembling product information such as warranties, maintenance manuals, spare parts, special tools, etc. from paper-based to electronic data exchange from the original source to the final user. Specific COBIE objectives are:

Provide a simple format for real-time information exchange for existing design and construction contract deliverables

Clearly identify requirements and responsibilities for business processes Cost less than current paper-based method Be acceptable to all large and small contractors, suppliers, owners, etc. Provide a framework to store information for later exchange/retrieval; Add no cost to operations and maintenance; Permit direct import to owner’s maintenance management system

A three component spiral-development process has been employed. At the lowest level is a translation of business rules and data exchange elements directly into the IFC model. At the middle level is an identification of the data exchange elements and constraints on their use. At the top level is a business process model that motivates the need for information exchange and allows validation of the effort. COBIE does not require that information be provided by designers to initialize the model: transfer of BIM from the design stage is useful, but is not mandatory. REAL-TIME SUBMITTAL PROCESSING. When construction related computer applications for personal computers first began, submittal registers were among the first to be created. These registers contain the information needed to identify the location of each submittal, find late or missing submittals, and monitor review times. In state-of-practice systems, submittals are still provided in paper format and manually routed for approval. The first COBIE project to reduce loss of data between construction and operations is a real-time submittal processing application developed as part of the Project Extranet (ProjNetsm) suite of tools. Concurrently, an EXCEL option provides an opportunity for those who do not use ProjNetsm(sm) to employ COBIE. These tools allow submittal content in PDF format and specific meta-data to be exchanged along with the administrative tracking of submittals. COBIE permits facility managers to know the specifics of each piece of equipment including serial number, location, installer, and warrantor. For example, Table 1 lists some of the data that may be required for a valve in addition to a valve cut-sheet. The Cut-Sheet Reference field directly links the meta-data provided to specific submittals allowing the cut-sheet for the valves data to be retrieved.

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Table 1. Valve Cut-Sheet Attributes Field Name Cut-Sheet Reference Valve Type Valve System Valve Count

EQUIPMENT SERIAL NUMBER CAPTURE. The contractor, who receives equipment and knows equipment serial numbers, selects the corresponding submittal, and enters the equipment’s serial number and name plate data. EQUIPMENT AND MATERIAL PLACEMENT. The contractor can provide equipment locations as the equipment is installed. An example of the type of location specific information is shown in Table 2. The Cut-Sheet Reference value allows the cut-sheet and Table 1 data to be retrieved. The location where the valve was installed, its normal operating position, and a brief descriptive phrase are provided. Once the valve tags arrive on the site, each individual valve tag can be referenced to its appropriate valve.

Table 2. Valve Location Attributes Field Name Cut-Sheet Reference Room Number Valve Normal Position Valve Location Description Valve Tag Number

Construction contractors will benefit from using COBIE because it will decrease the cost of providing required information. For example, documenting valve tag data during construction provides automated valve tag lists which are difficult to create after valves are hidden by various obstructions. The decrease in cost of site surveys to gather information during commissioning will more than offset the cost of collecting the data when it is initially available. WARRANTY CAPTURE. The contractor can identify the name of the party holding the warranty, link to a specific warranty certificate, identify corresponding equipment, and identify the terms of the warranty. MAINTENANCE INSTRUCTIONS CAPTURE. The contractor can link data provided in PDF format to the related type of equipment found in the submittal register. Capturing this information in a central repository, although not in computable format, still provides easy access for operators and will decrease the duration accomplishing of work orders and down time due to lackof readily available schematics and part lists. MAINTENANCE SYSTEM EXCHANGE. At the end of construction, equipment information and location, system descriptions and warranty information are captured. Facility

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maintenance offices who utilize maintenance and facility management systems should be able to accept/exchange information captured through the submittal register. FUTURE COBIE CAPABILITY: CENTRALIZED EQUIPMENT CATALOGUE. According to anecdotal evidence, construction contractors often collate submittal packages to ensure completeness and compliance with individual client’s requirements. COBIE intends to support the processes used by construction contractors to prepare submittals. Tools will be constructed that allow the collation of submission of various submittal documents from the complete set of construction team members. Meta-data needed for various pieces of equipment and building materials will be transitioned from contractor manually entered limited meta-data to a full data description provided by manufacturers. The set of required data will be based on established sources such as the buildingSMART IFC Model. Table 3 provides an example list of those attributes needed for the IfcFan object.

Table 3. Partial Listing of IfcFan Attributes Field Name Data Type Size PrimaryEnergySource Text 50 ImpellerDiameter Number Double AirFlowType Text 50 StaticPressure Number Double FanPressureClass Text 50 FanWheelType Text 50 WheelMaterial Text 50 WheelTipSpeed Number Double DischargeVelocity Number Double HousingMaterial Text 50 DischargePressureLoss Number Double

FanDischargeType Text 50 FanArrangement Text 50 FanRotation Text 50 FanDriveArrangement Text 50 DrivePowerLoss Number Double MotorDriveType Text 50 MotorInAirstream Yes/No - FanMountingType Text 50

FUTURE COBIE SUPPORT FROM PRODUCTGUIDE. To assist manufacturers to provide complete and correct sets of product data, the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) has developed “ProductGuide” as part of its Whole Building Design Guide.[5] One ProductGuide objective is to work with equipment manufacturers to create a centralized equipment catalog which complements buildingSMART. Manufacturer supplied information will be expanded over time to include meta-data needed for COBIE. A web service provided by NIBS will allow the automated submission of ProductGuide

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documents and meta-data into enhanced submittal registers such as that being included in ProjNetsm. FUTURE COBIE CAPABILITY: PERFORMANCE SPECIFICATION COMPLIANCE. Performance-based specifications require that products and equipment perform to standards identified in the specifications. Manufacturer’s current submittals reference these standards to signal to approving officials that the equipment meets the specification requirements. A future COBIE phase will validate IFC, and other data requirements, to ensure that meta-data provided allows the automated evaluation of performance specification compliance. FUTURE COBIE CAPABILITY: AS-MAINTAINED FACILITY INVENTORY. During the operational phase of the project, a facility may be upgraded and renovated many times. To ensure that the information in the building model is accurate over time, operations and maintenance personnel will need to update the BIM to reflect changes. Future projects will identify streamlined methods for service and other small contractors to interact with the model as part of their standard business process. To support the As-Maintained facility inventory, a survey tool is planned to allow maintainers to quickly gather information as they perform routine maintenance activities. COBIE PARTICIPANTS AND EARLY RESULTS. In addition to representatives from previously cited agencies and organizations, COBIE is the product of contributions by many others –owners, designers, constructors, commissioners, maintainers, and software developers – with balanced participation from within the .gov, .mil, .org, and .com domains. Thirteen commercial firms providing software currently participate in the effort to implement the COBIE maintenance information exchange. The Army’s Installation Management Agency – Northwest Region has incorporated the draft COBIE Pilot Implementation Standard into contract requirements. One maintenance management software firm, TMA Systems, has done benchmark comparisons between using the COBIE standard and conventional information acquisition practices with its customers. The intuitive, the anecdotal, and the empirical evidence gathered to date all confirm the hypothesis that COBIE achieves its objectives. ADDITIONAL COBIE INFORMATION. Those seeking additional information regarding COBIE, the National Building Information Model Standard, or buildingSMART may contact the authors, or they may examine the following websites: COBIE Overview Briefing: http://nbims.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=352 Draft COBIE Requirements Analysis and Pilot Implementation Standard Specification: http://nbims.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=353 Draft Pilot Test Implementers Information: http://nbims.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=355 2006-09-20 COBIE Pilot Implementation Spreadsheet: http://nbims.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=357

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REFERENCES [1] Developing Data-Input Standards for Computerized Maintenance Management Systems, Summary of Symposium/Workshop (1994), FFC Technical Report #123, National Academies Press, Washington, DC. [2] Linking the Construction Industry: Electronic Operation and Maintenance Manuals: Workshop Summary (2000), Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, National Research Council, ISBN: 0-309-07131-3, National Academies Press, Washington, DC. [3] International Alliance for Interoperability – North America Chapter, OMSI Final Report and Flat XML http://www.iai-na.org/technical/documents.php, citation on October 12, 2006. [4] East, E. W. and Kirby, J. G. (2006). Evolving a building information model, Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Computing and Decision Making in Civil and Building Engineering, Montréal, Canada, June 14-16, 2006, p. 2302-2310. [5] National Institute of Building Sciences (2006) “ProductGuide,” http://wbdg.org/productguide/, citation on October 12, 2006. 1 Experimental Facilities Engineer, Facilities Engineering and Real Property Division, NASA, 300 E St, SW, Washington, DC, 20546, phone 201.358.1117, fax 202.358.2861, wbrodt@nasa.gov

2Ph.D., Research Civil Engineer, Engineering Research and Development Center, 2902 Newmark Dr., Champaign, IL 61826-9005, phone 217.373.6710, fax 217.373.6724, bill.w.east@erdc.usace.army.mil

3Senior Researcher, Engineering Research and Development C enter, 2902 Newmark Dr., Champaign, IL 61826-9005, phone 217.373.6730, j-kirby@cecer.army.mil

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