Tell the World: We Are More than Scan-to-BIM

Tell the World: We Are More than Scan-to-BIM - 22/08/2019

Mohsen Kalantari

Building information modelling (BIM) will be a growing opportunity for the surveying and spatial industry, providing we focus more on adding value to BIM and concentrate on what we can offer to other industries thanks to BIM rather than merely preparing it. Opportunities in digital twins, smart buildings, smart infrastructures and smart cities require more than just BIM as data. The surveying and spatial industry will not benefit from this growing market without fully realizing the BIM market opportunity and providing advocacy, leadership and education in BIM.
Scan-to-BIM is promising but even more lies beyond
With the increasing availability of laser scanning technologies, scan-to-BIM has become the major pathway for the surveying and spatial professional to contribute to the digital engineering of buildings and infrastructure. While there is a growing demand for the scan-to-BIM service within the architecture engineering and construction (AEC) industry, it is essential to note that this service – which effectively is a 3D surveying and mapping service – is a small part of the broader BIM economy. Analysis of the various facets of surveying and geospatial market reveals that the growth in surveying and mapping services and survey equipment is marginal. The message from the analysis is clear: the cost of collecting geospatial data will continue to decline and there will be limited growth in services related to surveying and mapping. In contrast, a fast-growing area is GIS and what we can do with the spatial data. We can draw some similarities between BIM and GIS. BIM will be no different to surveying and mapping if we only focus on preparing data and information. If we go beyond modelling building information, however, we can discover a continuum of opportunities.
Adopt the SDI philosophy for buildings and infrastructure
As surveying and spatial professionals, our immediate contribution lies in modelling buildings and infrastructure and this is already being done with considerable success in the AEC industry. However, BIM is about more than merely representing buildings and infrastructure using spatial information; it is also about collaborative data environments (CDEs) and a solution for the fragmented AEC business model. Based on the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) philosophy and our expertise in spatial data management, standards can be adopted in developing CDEs to facilitate the operation of buildings and infrastructure. We have longstanding expertise in generalizing large-scale spatial data to create a small-scale map. BIM provides opportunities to evolve GIS technologies that are focused primarily on outdoor environments into technologies that can be used for indoor spatial analysis. One single building presents all these opportunities for creating BIM, creating CDEs, maintaining and analysing the BIM data and converting it to city models. However, the AEC industry is not yet fully aware of these capacities in the surveying and spatial industry.
Advocate, lead, research and educate in BIM
There are endless opportunities for adding value to BIM and we need to find the niche for the spatial industry. The essential points in the BIM value-add are the need for data integration and information sharing, and for complete digital information about buildings. Our expertise in integrating, sharing and managing spatial information opens a new door and is an opportunity to gain more prominence in AEC. Moreover, we cannot play a more significant role in society and develop business opportunities unless we define and highlight what we can do by advocating BIM to stakeholders of the built environment. Plenty of questions are still unanswered: from integrating BIM with surveying and the spatial coordination of BIM, to translating data between BIM to GIS for our research and development community. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, we need to rethink the surveying and spatial engineering curriculum and to upskill the profession. There is an urgent need to update surveying and spatial training and education so that BIM becomes integrated into our knowledge and its prominence is highlighted to our students and the broader profession.

"The AEC industry is not yet fully aware of these capacities in the surveying and spatial industry."

Ordnance Survey Demonstrates BIM Potential with Pioneering Project in Singapore

Ordnance Survey Demonstrates BIM Potential with Pioneering Project in Singapore - 05/12/2019

By combining building information modelling (BIM) with geospatial technologies, Ordnance Survey (OS) is breaking down barriers in Singapore. OS has spent two years in the Southeast-Asian nation championing the use of BIM data and its potential to transform urban planning. Britain’s mapping agency lent its expertise to a project with the University of Singapore and the Singaporean government that aims to make Singapore a world leader in smart technology. OS’s role was to develop data processing and 3D data modelling to help Singapore plan its future city more effectively. It contributed knowledge about the CityGML data model, an exchange compatible with BIM that stores digital 3D models and cities, so that data can be automated.
Limited space
This comes at a vital time for Singapore. The densely populated country, roughly the size of London, has ambitions to grow from 5.5 million to 7 million people. But space is limited. Housing is high rise, with people living in 30 to 40-storey buildings. At the same time Singapore has a height restriction on new developments because of airports at one end of the city.
OS senior technical product manager, James Crawford, said: “There is a real premium on space, and a real premium on space for people. They have got ambitions to grow their population, but they have constraints from their geography, and all the different demands they are trying to manage as a city nation.
“Not just where buildings fit it in, but what it looks like and how. They have a real need for managing construction design and development, because how do you meet those challenges? The investment they have chosen to make is in digital copies of their buildings. This essentially is where BIM models could provide an ongoing resource for them to use.”
Lego for buildings
For the construction industry, using BIM data is a step forward because it pulls together every element of the building process into one place, from each domain, using an exchangeable data format. Historically, for example, design teams, or electrical teams, stored their individual data in different formats and places. Working together in BIM gives a clearer and more rounded vision for everyone involved.
“It’s hard to get your head around the complexity involved in making a building come to life,” said Crawford. “You have many different specialisms across engineering and design each with their own data formats. But with BIM, it is like having Lego for buildings. To a level of detail where even the type of light bulbs, door handle materials can be specified – potentially everything that the construction, planning and engineering teams use to put the building together. It is insanely complex, but BIM gives you a road map for getting there easier. All parties can comprehend it.”

Digital city model

Singapore’s geospatial industry and urban planning departments are responsible for deciding what the city will look like in 20-30 years’ time. Having more data, such as BIM, enables them to plan and design areas with specific groups in mind, such as the young, the elderly, and community groups. Construction can take two or three years, so if urban planners can access information at the earliest stages, preferably before new buildings are built, it affords time to make changes that impact both the building and the outdoors environment.
James said: “Both the urban planning and geospatial teams have access to new information that they didn’t have access to before. They can now improve the depth of analysis they can do, by extracting the information they need from BIM models. For example, if you want to optimise pathways and mobility access between the indoors and outdoors, are the current building plans achieve this result? How do you figure out what and where changes are required? You need connected digital models to do those types of analysis.”
He added that Ordnance Survey had made important steps towards helping Singapore’s construction and geospatial industries, by encouraging the use of Open Geospatial Consortium’s City GML data standard. This was having a galvanizing effect on getting both sectors to collaborate.
James said: “Building trust and relationships between the construction and geospatial industries is paramount. The construction industry knows what is going to be built. The geospatial industry knows about location and context. Consequently, geospatial planners, who plan what the geography of urban areas is going to look like in the future, they have some requirements that can influence what gets built in the first place. There is kind of an iterative circle.”

Removing the technical complexity

OS is working alongside other leaders in the domain, such as the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) programme for Digital Twins to ensure the learnings discovered from the research project in Singapore can be transferred back home. Despite the obvious geographic differences, and the time taken to adopt emerging technologies such as BIM between both nations, Crawford believes a lot of aspects from the project offers value if implemented in the UK context.
He said: “The use cases that were developed, and the requirements for information that planning departments need, is applicable here, because we have urban planning departments in local authorities that are all looking at how to manage space more effectively and so on. The key thing to get across is to remove the technical complexity so people can have a conversation. The world is becoming more complicated at a speedy trajectory that is hard to keep up with.”
“When you have senior decision makers that don’t understand the technical detail, it’s our job to simplify this right down and explain why it is worth investing in technologies that improve collaboration and how beneficial this can be when planning cities in the future.”