Interview
On the subject of COBie AEC Magazine caught up with Simon Gilbert of Solibri UK to discuss common issues surrounding the production of COBie and why it seems so painful for many AEC Magazine: There is always a lot of complaining about IFC and COBie deliverables. Has IFC improved over the last five years? Simon Gilbert: Yes, massively. I think the problem actually is back down to education, where people have to understand that it’s not just about IFC being a ‘File Save As’. It’s about a snapshot in time of a delivery, combining data and geometry, a project deliverable. If you think of it that way, you have to ask, ‘What are we delivering?’ It’s not just a file format; it’s a subset of data that users have to configure and understand. If users know what they are doing from a mapping point of view they can get really a good quality IFC file that can be
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used by other people with confidence in its consistency. AEC: A lot of the complexity isn’t helped with the way certain popular products, like Revit don’t handle IFC properly. SG: This is what we struggle with on a day to day basis. Many people really not understanding this. A common and basic problem is users can’t get the models in the same location, with the fudging that Autodesk has done on coordinates. I have to teach people who need to work with COBie how to get their models aligned. Zoning is also an issue because Revit doesn’t understand the concept of containers and zones. They are created in Revit MEP, but they not in the Revit
Architecture part. You end up doing the same work over and over again. A system for Revit in the MEP is basically only pipe and duct services but, actually, in IFC a system is a collection of any objects, but you can’t create your IFC systems with anything else. So, you are absolutely jumping through hoops to try and get it to work. You can’t create property sets, you can only use the property sets that are inside Revit, which means they have to be mapped out to the right location. This means you end up with a disconnect between the properties inside Revit, against the properties inside the IFC file. There are all these things that users need to understand. People aren’t using the right builds of IFC exporter, or they use the one straight out of the box. Some haven’t even
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