by Shane Henson — November 4, 2011—Building practitioners and software vendors hoping to improve their use and performance of open-standard building information models (BIMs) can now do so through using Common BIM Files offered through the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) buildingSMART alliance, an organization leading the creation of tools and standards that allow projects to be built electronically before they are built physically using BIM.
The Common BIM Files are a free set of three building models: an apartment building, a medical clinic and an office building. Each model includes architectural, mechanical, electrical and plumbing information. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) developed the Common BIM Files as a result of a research project to establish life cycle information exchange (LCie) standards for building models.
“These Common BIM Files will help vendors benchmark the performance of their software applications and practitioners reduce or eliminate manual repairs otherwise needed to meet requirements for information exchange standards such as COBie (the Construction Operations Building information exchange),” said Bill East, a research civil engineer at ERDC. “Without standard models and tool sets, it’s difficult for researchers to evaluate and repeat research that requires building information. These new open models and tools can reduce the start-up time needed by researchers to do their work while improving the scientific merit of their results.”
