A newly approved international standard may just be the key to help speed up the construction sector’s digital transformation–starting by making BIM data format accessible.

Notwithstanding its outsized importance to the world’s modern economy, the construction sector’s digital transition has remained rather slow compared to other industries. While technological shifts have been predicted for ages, they still have to materialize due in most part to the sector’s subpar digital spending.

According to a 2016 report by McKinsey, a global consulting firm, construction companies invest less than 1 percent of revenues to improve their digital capital and assets despite the availability of new software solutions that could increase productivity.

“The industry has not yet embraced new digital technologies that need up-front investment even if the long-term benefits are significant,” says Rajat Agarwal, Shankar Chandrasekaran, and Mukund Sridhar, the report’s authors.

Betting on new digital technologies can generate enhanced productivity by improving the efficiency of a construction firm’s processes, such as in the creation of blueprints and design drawings, which have been traditionally traced on paper. Shying away from digitization, however, results in belated information sharing, sloppy analytics, and poor coordination among partners. In construction projects where digital technologies are not actively leveraged, for example, “owners and contractors often work from different versions of reality,” notes the McKinsey report.

A useful technology, but often overlooked by the construction sector, is building information modeling (BIM). As a project-planning tool, BIM can bridge the gap between architects, engineers, and other professionals as they plan, design, and construct their projects. Because partners can interact with the same computer-generated model, BIM promotes closer teamwork while boosting work efficiency via highly detailed calculations as well as better detection of design conflicts and errors.

Yet despite its many advantages, a World Economic Forum (WEF) report observes a low adoption of BIM among construction companies compared to design and engineering firms, its earliest advocates. The significantly high set-up costs related to software licensing, hardware acquisition, and staff training are commonly cited as factors that deter BIM uptake.

Promoting open data-sharing standards and open systems in BIM could help change that, asserts the WEF report. Take the case of geographic information systems (GIS) where the use of open file formats in the last decade has facilitated greater data interoperability in the mapping and surveying industries. This swing toward shareable data has not only attracted more users and lowered overhead costs, but it has also created new and innovative location-based products and services that are sustaining the growth of the $452 billion geospatial market as we know it today.

That is why the approval of IFC 4.3, the latest open standard for BIM adopted this year by the International Organization for Standardization (as ISO 16739), should be a welcome development for the construction industry as it pursues a path to full digital transformation.

The IFC 4.3 standard has been developed by buildingSMART International, a UK-based non-profit organization, which aims to improve the exchange of information between software applications in the construction industry. Although it took the organization a decade to make IFC 4.3 an international open standard for BIM, buildingSMART International believes that it has produced a lasting data format that will help usher the construction sector into the digital future.

“The formal publication of IFC 4.3 as an internationally accredited standard is a testament to the tireless efforts of everyone involved in its development,” said Clive Billiald, chief executive of buildingSMART International. “Their efforts have delivered a standard which will support the built environment sector for many years to come, contributing to a more productive and sustainable industry.”

IFC and OpenBIM

IFC stands for Industry Foundation Classes, an open standard for the exchange of data about a building and its construction or maintenance. As a digital data model, the IFC defines how BIM-related data is organized and structured in a relational database, describing how a particular building is constructed and the physical components that make it up.

The IFC is not a new data format, however. It has been evolving for decades starting in the early 1990s when Autodesk and 12 other companies formed a consortium to cooperate in creating a data model that would allow interoperability between software platforms. The ISO-certified IFC 4.3 is the data model’s latest iteration.

As a product of cross-sector cooperation, the use of IFC in BIM is beneficial for the industry because it is vendor-neutral. This means that BIM users can create and access BIM models using various software applications, including Autodesk’s Revit, Bentley’s OpenBuildings, as well as SketchUp and Solibri, among others. Because of this agnostic nature, the IFC has become the preferred BIM data format when submitting designs of civil works in several countries such as Denmark, Finland, and Norway.

Apart from the IFC, other open data formats in BIM are also available, such as the BCF, COBie, and CityGML. The use of these open formats in BIM projects makes what is called the OpenBIM approach possible. From a cost-effective perspective, construction firms should find the OpenBIM approach desirable because it offers a universal approach to digital model creation. By relying on several open standard data formats and workflows, OpenBIM allows for better collaborative design, construction, and operation of buildings compared to projects that require the use of just a single software application. Essentially, users have the autonomy to choose the best BIM software that matches their budget, skills, and project scale.

According to buildingSMART International, OpenBIM’s principles of interoperability and sustainability eliminates the traditional problem in BIM data management that is “typically constrained by proprietary vendor data formats, whether by discipline or by the phase of a project.”

Multi-software suitability, however, cannot be useful if the quality of data is compromised, especially when BIM operators switch from one platform to another. With the OpenBIM approach, this problem is avoided because by using IFC and other standard open data formats, multi-platform users can easily make design changes throughout the entire project life cycle without data loss. Maintaining data integrity allows important workflows such as structural design analysis, construction cost estimation, and project progress monitoring to be carried out.

Real-world applications

Taken altogether, the OpenBIM approach offers flexibility that will allow construction firms to create projects that would enable others to build upon them, effectively creating BIM models that are future-proof. With the latest ISO certification of IFC 4.3, plus the panoply of BIM software platforms available to users, now is the right moment for the construction sector to sweep away paper-based data conventions and the lack of open data exchange standards as relics of the past.

Experts in the city of Vienna are doing just that. With the population growth of Austria’s capital over the last decade, the Vienna Building Authority needs to process an average of 13,000 paper-based building applications every year. To reduce the duration of construction approval, which usually takes around 12 months, the building permit process has been digitized into an integrated OpenBIM-based system.

A building’s life cycle typically starts with the application of a building permission. But because building plans are traditionally printed and submitted on paper, the information about a building’s design cannot be used directly within Vienna’s digital urban planning database. Digitizing this initial step can already speed up the building application process to automatically examine for gaps in existing building codes.

Under the guidance of the BRISE project (Building Regulations Information for Submission Evolvement), the permit application process now runs on an entirely BIM platform that uses the IFC open data standard format. Implemented since 2022, applicants can now submit their building plans as a digital BIM model, which city planners can subsequently use to cross-check against existing legal frameworks. Going digital also allows the city to provide faster feedback to the building owners and contractors.

According to the city of Vienna, the new digital building permit procedures “takes up to 50 percent less time than the conventional procedure.” The building’s stakeholders can also view the status of their application in real-time, allowing for a more transparent process.

Another example where OpenBIM can be successfully used is in the management of large infrastructure assets, such as the case of the Cancello–Benevento railway line in Italy. The 47-kilometer (29 miles) track runs south of Rome and is operated by a local transport company. Modernization efforts to make the local rail service comply with national rail standards involved the application of BIM methodologies to digitize the entire infrastructure and help improve its upkeep.

The use of OpenBIM was deemed important for an Italian railway project for two reasons. First, standardizing the digital model of the local rail assets makes it easier to be assessed against national-level safety criteria. The second reason is based on sustainability. Asset management informs future maintenance for continuous operation, thus updating the digital model using IFC standards should be trouble-free in the long-term. Owing to its successful BIM implementation, the Cancello–Benevento railway project was selected as a finalist in the 2021 OpenBIM buildingSMART awards.

Transition takes time

The potential of BIM to modernize the construction sector is huge, and indeed there are many more cases of on-going OpenBIM projects around the world that can show the breadth of BIM’s utility. Check out this year’s list of nominees for the buildingSMART awards and you will see OpenBIM-enabled construction projects taking place not just in North America, Europe, and China, but also in emerging countries such as Angola, Columbia, and Romania, among others.

This trend is encouraging and suggests a future where widespread use of BIM in the industry is achievable. But that transition will take time, even when vendor-neutral options already exist.

A quick glance at the history of the geospatial industry provides a valuable lesson. While open GIS data were already available during the late 1990s, it was not until the 2010s that mapping projects based on open data sources and platforms fully took off. As in any sector, users tend to be wary about the impact of new technologies.

That is why the work that many private organizations like buildingSMART do to actively promote the adoption of OpenBIM in the construction industry is laudable. However, this should also be supported by national-level initiatives and legislation that will promote open data use in construction. While European governments are leading the way on this topic, other countries should also do the same to achieve wider BIM uptake.

Perhaps persuading and supporting smaller construction firms to use BIM might also help. Results from the Digital Construction Report released last year by NBS, an organization that tracks global BIM trends, showed that BIM adoption drops by 56 to 60 percent in companies with a staff of 15 to 25 people. Digital transition is understandably slower in this segment because unlike companies with bigger revenues, smaller firms cannot simply afford to replace outdated systems in a flash.

Despite all the tech and open data available, without private and public support, BIM’s full adoption in the construction sector will remain far from reality. 

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