Automatic Generation of COBIE Data from Revit

Abstract

As the usage of BIM increased in the construction industry, some construction owners started exploring the use of BIM for maintaining their facilities. Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE), a spreadsheet data format suggested in 2007 to manipulate building information, is considered as one of the solutions that would facilitate the process of transferring information from BIM to applications for facilities management. Several BIM and Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) applications offer functions to export or import the COBIE data. To facilitate the process of generating the COBIE data out of Building Information Model, some add-in applications, such as COBIE Toolkit for Revit, also were developed. However, most of these applications handle a limited amount of COBIE data. Professionals using these add-in applications therefore sometimes end up spending a significant amount of time to add additional data manually to the COBIE data file. To automatically get a data-rich COBIE file, we developed a prototype application that extracts information from Revit, which is one of the BIM authoring tools, stores them in an external database, and then produces the COBIE file using information stored in the database. We applied our application to a pilot project and produced 8 COBIE worksheets automatically, which demonstrated a significant amount of time saving. This paper presents how our prototype application produces 8 COBIE data sets automatically. It also addresses our attempt to handle more COBIE data sets.

Industrialized and Project-Based Construction - Standards Versus Business Models

“…Within land surveying there is a standard data model and exchange format called CityGML that enables common 3D urban objects of cities and landscapes, such as buildings, roads, rivers, bridges and vegetation, to be shared and exchanged between applications. The establishment of COBie, Construction Operations Building Information Exchange, provides an example of a standard data spreadsheet format that facilitates information deliveries from BIM systems to Computer Aided Facility Management (CAFM) systems for facility's operation and maintenance (FM) [8]. BuildingSMART [9] has developed bsDD, the buildingSMART data dictionary, which constitutes an open and international standard library of construction concepts and their attributes [10].…”