Nat ional Inst it ut e of Bui lding Sc ie nc es Fac ilit ies Inform at ion Counc il Nat ional BIM St andard 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 buildingSMART with COBIE 1 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 z Provide a simple format for real time information exchange for existing design and construction contract deliverables z Clearly identify requirements and responsibilities for business processes z Cost less than current paper based method z Be acceptable to all large and small contractors suppliers owners etc z Provide a framework to store information for later exchange retrieval z Add no cost to operations and maintenance z 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 buildingSMART with COBIE 2 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
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