I’ve been thinking about the importance of Open Standards lately – how they can be the answer to translating and transferring all engineering data into more digestible and information-rich formats. We’ve heard a lot about how other industries have gone to an Open Standard deliverable requirement and use 3D design models for construction and operations. But what do Open Standards really mean?

Open Standards

Open Standards implies “open systems.” In other words, an existing component in a system can be replaced by that of another vendor. In software development, Open Standards act as guidelines to keep technologies freely available for developers to create tools around a free and published framework. Frankly, this would mean we may not have to pay to use certain file formats – like a PDF.

In 2008, Adobe released PDF from proprietary to an Open Standard. As a software developer, I can develop tools for a PDF without needing to pay for Adobe. One may argue that the reason we have so many tools to edit and create a PDF is because developing tools for it is free. Fun fact: a PNG image format was created as an open-source alternative to JPEG because JPEG is still proprietary.

Industry Foundation Classes

A similar situation may be unfolding with Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) by BuildingSmart. In late 2019, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) signed Administrative Resolution AR-1-19 to recommend the adoption of IFC as the national standard for data schemas for electronic engineering data. BuildingSmart describes IFC as a standardized, open, digital description of the built asset industry.

IFC in its current form started in 1997 and was primarily developed for the vertical building industry. In recent years, transportation definitions have developed, but are still widely considered incomplete. It may take many more years for IFC to be relevant and take hold in the US Transportation market.

A 2019 study from Malmö University in Sweden outlines some of IFC’s current uses in construction along with its future potential. Sweden requires IFC as a deliverable. The study concluded that, “IFC loses information due to current format deficiencies and a lack of knowledge by its users. IFC must be further developed in order for the players in the construction industry to be even more motivated to use IFC as a standard format.” IFC’s potential for important and relevant data to live on through the entire project lifecycle is enormous, but its current version is not well defined and is often supplemented with 2D drawings.

Within IFC, Model View Definitions (MVD) describe a specific purpose or workflow for the IFC data. MVDs will tell you if the IFC data should be used for contractor review, for precast manufacturers to build something, or for operations to update and maintain field assets.

A 2D analogy for an MVD might look like defining the plan set requirements. This includes all the details that need to be conveyed in the plan set for its intended purpose, the paper size, font, scale, paper material (bond or mylar), thickness of paper, and even the language of the plan set. It will also define the annotations, descriptions, and dimensions of each design element. A significant amount of detail must be standardized, agreed upon, and disseminated for each MVD.

Since MVDs for transportation are not yet available, many organizations and companies are looking into creating their own MVDs, or IFC property sets, separate from anyone else. A designer might map their storm sewer pipe to a building pipe in their IFC file because a storm sewer is not yet defined in IFC. This is what is meant by the term “building proxy.” As another example, guardrails in IFC may be mapped to doorknobs. The actual geometry and model may look correct at face value, but all the attributes would align with a doorknob and may not be useful to someone else down the road (pun intended). This is not to say that IFC is without use. The construction industry utilizes IFC for many non-standard and proprietary tasks, but without defined MVD’s and all the required property sets, IFC is the Wild West and not really a standard.

Even though AASHTO adopted IFC as the standard BIM schema in 2019, it will be many years before it becomes prevalent the way PDFs are today. As an industry, we recognize that the world of information and data is rapidly changing. We are eagerly awaiting one of the first transportation centric MVD for tangible use in 2022. As IFC develops, matures, and more MVD’s and property sets are defined, Bentley will be in lockstep to help define the future of our industry in an Open Standards world.