Collaboration par excellence

Example: Hasselt City Hall, Belgium — The building of the new municipal administration center in Hasselt, Belgium, demonstrates how seamless collaboration in building projects can minimize risks and save costs from the design phase all the way to commissioning.
A joint project of several brands of the Nemetschek Group.
Nemetschek brands involved: Allplan, GRAPHISOFT, Solibri

Pioneering planning and project execution with Open BIM

“The end-to-end use of BIM solutions constitutes genuine added value for all stakeholders in the building process
because it enables seamless and efficient collboration”
Steven Hendrickx, Head Architect in Hasselt

Large-scale, highly complex building projects in particular require ongoing, reliable and efficient coodination between all stakeholders – both internal and external – across disciplines and between companies. Therefore, in association with other market players, the Nemetschek Group is promoting the Open BIM data standard. This is a universal, collaborative approach to designing, constructing and operating buildings based on open standards and workflows It makes it possible for project stakeholders to collaborate, even if the type of software varies from user to user. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) interface has established itself as an open standard and is therefore of central significance.

Sharing and evaluating data throughout the entire product life cycle saves time and money and improves quality. The administration of data is key to this digital transformation, for it is only possible to take full advantage of the potential if each stakeholder can access the data that he or she needs at any given time. This begins with a realistic BIM building model, which is an essential prerequisite for a genuine 5D workflo. This model is no longer limited to just 3D construction data; it also includes data concerning the dimensions of time and costs.

Seamless collaboration exemplified by the Hasselt City Hall

Under the management of the architect team comprising Jaspers-Eyers, MASS Architects and Michel Janssen, a new municipal administration center is being built in Hasselt. The complex, consisting of a renovated building section and a new building, provides approx. 17,000 m2 for the city administration and social services as well as offices. The architects and their most important partners are using Open BIM software solutions for the entire construction process. Three Nemetschek solutions are being implemented for this project: Archicad from Graphisoft for the design and planning of the architects, Allplan Engineering for civil engineering, and the Solibri Model Checker for the BIM quality control carried out by the construction company.

From the beginning, all information concerning the building project is contained in the digital building model – from the draft to implementation – including all design details, desired materials, fire protection requirements, acoustic properties, insulation and building structures, and administration. This constitutes considerable added value for all stakeholders compared to the old standard model, which was purely 3D. Thus, this improvement ensures more than just seamless collaboration between all those involved. The complex project can be turned over to the municipality – the proud building owner – with the required quality, on time and within the specified budget.

Hasselt City Hall is groundbreaking – in terms of design, planning and project implementation.

Independent and yet consistent

Steven Hendrickx, the head architect in Hasselt, recognized four decisive factors with Open BIM over the course of the successful project:

  • Individual partners design their model with their preferred BIM software, and with their own templates. Outstanding collaboration is ensured, though, thanks to a common, uniform standard which is specified in advance.
  • The division of labor is defined at the beginning of the project. Data on statics, for instance, have an essential impact on the architecture and structural design. Data on heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, on the other hand, are also important but don’t generally flow directly into the architecture. These data, for example, can be sufficiently analyzed with the BIM solution for quality assurance from Solibri.
  • Design changes in one area don’t necessarily affect the plans of all the others involved in the project. The architecture and the building stage are inherently the most closely linked.
  • The expertise of the staff, i.e., extensive holistic knowledge of the various building disciplines, is also critical for the success of the project.

Two examples of the advantage of precise planning

In Hasselt, the construction company was commissioned with excavation, among other tasks. An assessment of the amount of sand that needed to be removed was done based on a cal culation using conventional 2D planning methods, which yielded a result of 800 cubic meters. The engineers used the Solibri Model Checker based on Open BIM and the data provided by the architects and arrived at a figue that was just half this amount, i.e., 400 cubic meters of sand. This shows how exact the work with Open BIM solutions can be.

The steel struts to be installed are another example: With the interface function IFC Exports from Allplan, it was possible to use the BIM model to automatically calculate which steel struts needed fieproofing. All it took was a mouse click to obtain precise results, right down to the running meter. In projects that don’t use Open BIM solutions, these calculations are made by manually entering the data from 2D drawings in Excel or some other software and then recalculating and evaluating the data for use in quotations and planning, a process that is susceptible to error and one that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. These errors often go undetected until the actual cost planning is already completed. In the case of the Hasselt City Hall,  it was possible to avoid such errors from the outset.

Converting to Open BIM pays off

As is the case with any change, it takes a certain amount of time for companies and employees to accept BIM as the norm. The best way, according to Steven Hendrickx, is to start out by planning smaller projects using BIM. The experience thereby gained will make it possible to complete successively larger BIM projects. The advantages of collaborating through Open BIM are obvious: The entire workflow is much simpler for all project stakeholders, and building projects are completed within time and cost budgets.

CONCLUSION

Consistent standards and open interfaces in par-ticular are essential for successful building projects. Stakeholders need solutions that can “work together” for all and any individual tasks being performed. Seamless collaboration between humans and machines: This is ensured with Open BIM, and backed by the brands of the Nemetschek Group.

Reference projects on this topic:

GRAPHISOFT’s Brand-new BIMcloud Announced at Exclusive Tokyo Press Event

Graphisoft Brand News News Company News

 

Tokyo, March 25, 2014 – GRAPHISOFT® announced today its upcoming BIMcloud® Solution in the presence of selected international journalists and top Japanese AEC companies. The exclusive event took place at the prestigious Roppongi Hills Club of Tokyo with live connections to GRAPHISOFT’s Southeast Asia headquarters in Hong Kong as well as its global headquarters in Budapest.

“Most people associate Cloud Computing with online services such as Data Storage, Software Virtualization or Software as a Service (SaaS). Potentially, we could accomplish much more with the Cloud but we need to look beyond basic Cloud Services for that,” said Ákos Pfemeter, Vice President of Marketing at GRAPHISOFT. “It may not be part of the common understanding today, but we strongly believe that Cloud Computing is most disruptive to the way people collaborate. GRAPHISOFT’s upcoming BIMcloud Solution will leverage this specifically for the AEC industry by allowing firms of any size to implement fully-integrated BIM collaboration workflows both in public and private cloud environments…”

GRAPHISOFT BIMcloud

GRAPHISOFT’s BIMcloud® is a full-fledged BIM collaboration platform allowing teams of any size to collaborate on native BIM data in real-time. GRAPHISOFT’s patented Delta-Server™ technology, combined with cutting-edge cloud-server architecture, provides the essential features of a world-class BIM collaboration environment:

REAL-TIME - Collaboration is best performed through real-time connection between parties. Thanks to GRAPHISOFT’s patented Delta-Server technology, real-time collaboration on complex Building Information Models is possible regardless of the size or location of the collaborating team. Cloud-based system architecture guarantees simultaneous access to collaborative BIM projects 24/7 for any number of endpoints from any location in the world equipped with a standard Internet connection.

ROBUST - GRAPHISOFT’s BIMcloud Solution offers built-in conflict resolution, which means “server-locks” are completely unknown phenomena for its users. In addition, extremely high network tolerance makes even long distance access possible on standard Internet lines. Support for the secure HTTPS protocol and advanced backup and version rollback options provide your BIM data – the most valuable Intellectual Property asset related to any construction project – with unprecedented data safety.

FLEXIBLE - GRAPHISOFT’s BIMcloud Solution is not demanding on hardware or software. The same system can easily be deployed both in any public or private cloud setups. Connection between client computers running the BIM applications and server computers providing the collaboration platform in the cloud requires no special hardware or additional software: a simple Internet connection using standard HTTP protocol is the only requirement for real-time collaboration between virtually any locations in the world. For BIMcloud Servers, standard desktop configurations should suffice, while the BIM Cloud Manager is accessible in its full functionality from any mobile device.

SCALABLE - The Cloud’s most important advantage to real-time BIM collaboration is its capability to scale server resources. With the GRAPHISOFT BIMcloud, the project team does not need to stop working while the BIMcloud Server’s resources such as processors or memory size are increased. Another advantage is the system’s horizontal scaling with assigning new BIMcloud Servers on demand as the number of projects grows in the cloud.

INTEGRATED - GRAPHISOFT’s BIMcloud Solution is fully prepared for integration into large enterprises’ IT infrastructure. Dynamic Active Directory integration through LDAP protocol allows users to use their domain username/password combo to access their BIM projects in the cloud as well. Multi-tier user access and role management ensures that the BIMcloud can easily be adjusted to any organizational setup in any large enterprise environment. The BIMcloud’s Mobile integration allows external team members to participate in the BIM workflow using their mobile devices as well.

GRAPHISOFT’s BIMcloud Solution goes far beyond basic cloud services offerings available on the market today. It is an all-round cloud-based collaboration solution providing the complete software layer necessary for deployment on premises as a private cloud solution or in the public cloud as a cloud service. Thanks to its unique set of features, it is the only cloud solution that offers a true model-based BIM collaboration environment for companies and projects of any size. With the help of its mobile integration through the cloud, all stakeholders of the design-build process can actively participate in the collaborative work. The GRAPHISOFT BIMcloud is by design suited for even the most stringent enterprise level workflow and security requirements to provide a suitable solution for the collaboration problem of companies where collaboration is a critical part of conducting everyday business. Its private cloud setup option enables companies working on projects with extended security requirements to keep their data on premise and entirely under control, offering the benefits and flexibility of the cloud to all AEC projects without exception.

"This is the first time GRAPHISOFT will launch a worldwide rollout of a new product line in Japan," said Bence Kovács, Vice President of Asia, GRAPHISOFT. “This clearly shows the impressive progress our large Japanese customers have made in their BIM implementation in recent years. It also demonstrates our strategic focus on South-East Asia, which we believe is one of GRAPHISOFT’s most promising growth areas in the coming years,” he added.

The GRAPHISOFT BIMcloud® was released in Japan on March 25, and will be rolled out worldwide together with ArchiCAD 18 in Q2, 2014. Stay tuned for GRAPHISOFT BIMcloud news by visiting www.graphisoft.com/bimcloud/.

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