A digital tool for building information modelling

NBS will lead an exceptional project team to produce a fully costed, scheduled and de-risked proposal to deliver the outcomes described in the competition’s functional specification. The project team will include, BIM Academy, BDP, Laing O’Rourke, Microsoft and Newcastle University. NBS will build on their 6,000 object definitions that currently exist and are in-use within the UK construction industry through the NBS Create and NBS National BIM Library initiatives. With BDP and Laing O’Rourke, the team will prove and test our proposals within both the design and construction stages of a project, giving invaluable multi-disciplinary knowledge from the design, construction, manufacture and operation points of view. BIM Academy have experience working as Information Managers on leading UK and international construction projects and will also bring their open-source xBIM software toolkit to the bid. The Digital Institute at Newcastle University is a world leader in cloud computing research, addressing issues including, scalability and reliability of distributed cloud architectures, security and provenance of data and the processing and analysis of very large datasets. Microsoft will provide consultancy throughout the project and the technology will be built on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform.

We envisage delivering phase 2 as a fully cloud-based solution, scalable both within the UK and internationally. The Digital Presentation Tool (DPT) will be delivered both as a set of intuitive end-user tools and via API functionality to support third-party developers. The DPT will allow end users to search and browse digital object definitions and their associated LOD guidance, generate a project-specific digital Plan of Work (dPoW) and verify stage deliverable information in COBie format against the project-specific dPoW. Functionality will be built on the fundamental digital object definitions, their associated LOD guidelines and a unified classification system.

The phase 1 work will deliver:
- A fully documented report detailing the primary functions and workflow of the application, the software and content development strategies and an analysis of delivery against the functional specification.
- A working prototype of the Digital Presentation Tool demonstrating the creation of a subset of a digital Plan of Work and the verification of this against a COBie/IFC dataset.
- A fully costed phase 2 project plan detailing schedule, project management approach and all significant milestones.
This work will be verified by the wider industry through technical investigation and a number of user experience workshops. These workshops will involve a wide range of contacts within industry, including invited guest organisations.