Tag Archives: COBie

Autodesk “wins” buildingSMART COBie challenge

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One assumes that you could have heard a pin drop in the “Big 3” offices when the results of the buildingSMART COBie challenge were read out. Autodesk 1st, daylight second, and Bentley out-performs Graphisoft by over 2:1

“Autodesk Revit wins the buildingSMART alliance’s Design COBie Challenge. The Design COBie Challenge is an opportunity for software vendors to demonstrate the conformance and accuracy with the vendor-neutral interoperability format (COBie) that supports the exchange of building asset information.”

How could this be??

Well, although the official press-releases don’t mention it, the initial pilot project that the vendors were require to model was particularly difficult.  Apparently, given this was a mock project, many of the parameters were left blank by some participants, and actually marked for completion by the “end-user” as would be the case in a real-world scenario.

These were then interpreted by the buildingSMART judges as errors, and penalties applied. According to a source, all submissions made this type of error, however in the case of the Graphisoft submission, this error was replicated many times throughout the project file – thus accounting for the large penalty difference.

With that in mind, it would seem that the follow-up COBie Challenge for 2014 (which begins shortly) will be a much closer affair, as all participants will now take much “extra care” to avoid such errors.

Autodesk Revit wins the buildingSMART alliance’s Design COBie Challenge. The Design COBie Challenge is an opportunity for software vendors to demonstrate the conformance and accuracy with the vendor-neutral interoperability format (COBie) that supports the exchange of building asset information.

Challenge details:

  • The 1st test was for architectural design software at the early stages of the design process.
  • The 2nd test was with software that supports the delivery of a consolidated design model at the Construction Documents stage of design.
  • The 3rd test was with construction and commissioning software that imports data from Construction Documents stage COBie, updates that with construction data, and exports the Construction Handover Stage file.

The Results

The Autodesk Revit 2013 COBie Toolkit (plugin application) allowed the user to streamline the export and comply with the COBie xml table format (e.g. MS Excel) with almost zero errors. The user utilizing Autodesk Revit 2013 software is estimated to have to spend 9 minutes cleaning/fixing the COBie file for a facility of comparable size and complexity.

Company Product Result/Details
Autodesk Autodesk Revit 2013 9 minutes to correct
Bentley Systems AECOsim Building Designer (BETA) 3.6 hours to correct
GraphiSoft ArchiCAD 17 Beta 8 hours to correct

  

A new Bent for COBie? Bentley BuildingSMART COBie Challenge 2013 results …

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“Bentley’s model was by far the most complete and data-rich …” 

Bentley successfully participated in the ‘buildingSMART COBie Challenge 2013’ for architectural and mechanical, electrical, plumbing (MEP) design using AECOsim Building Designer.

With 80 types, 1,397 components, 18,171 attributes, Bentley’s model was by far the most complete and data-rich, thus posing a greater potential for data mismatches/penalty minutes. (Autodesk: 37 types, 478 components, 8,748 attributes; Graphisoft: 31 types, 472 components, 4,346 attributes). Also, the challenge was conducted with a beta version of AECOsim Building Designer and issues that incurred penalty minutes will be fixed in the released application.

Arguably, penalty minutes for content quality of the reproduced sample model have little relevance for the compliance with the COBie requirements of the output. Therefore, the conclusion that ‘a user utilizing Bentley software would have to spend 3.6 hours fixing/cleaning the COBie file’ is rather arbitrary and meaningless as it depends on the type of data, size of the model, skill of the user, etc.