Invicara BIM Assure: Cloud-Based Collaborative Model Checker

There has been little progress in the AEC industry so far in the application of technology to streamline the process of getting building approvals and permits from regulatory authorities, despite the fact that BIM—a critical component of the process—is now well established as the “go-to” technology for design and construction. However, a new application for model checking, BIM Assure, that will soon be launched should give fresh impetus to the eventual goal of automating code-checking in AEC. This review takes a detailed look at BIM Assure, its background, how it works, and the types of analyses that can be done with the application.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/review/2016/BIMAssure.html

3 thoughts on “Invicara BIM Assure: Cloud-Based Collaborative Model Checker”

  1. We have an advanced system to check the code compliance of buildings that is operational for over 10 years now. For details and live demo, please contact me.

  3. Thanks Lachmi for a very thorough review. In the Analysis and Conclusions, you comment that “…It would be great if some workaround could be developed to normalization so it does not have to be done at all—it would definitely make BIM Assure easier to use. As far as I know, this additional step is not needed in Solibri Model Checker, the only application that directly competes with BIM Assure. (However, Solibri Model Checker does require the model to have the correct IFC information to run its checks; if not, the fixes need to be made in the BIM authoring application.)”

    This problem is endemic to all use-cases of BIM in which one needs explicit and semantically accurate information for some downstream process. For example, people can see and identify spaces and their purposes even if they are not explicitly defined as Spaces and labeled with their intended function, but code-checking and other analysis software require this information.

    The challenge of adding such information is termed ‘Semantic Enrichment’, and it holds the promise of fulfilling Lachmi’s wish as stated in the article, and also of making interoperability a much smaller problem than it still is. In the future, a receiving BIM application may be able to semantically enrich a model passed to it by recognizing the intent from the geometry and supplementing the data with new objects, property values and relationships that enable the application to import the model as a native model.

    Details can be found in the following paper:

    Belsky, M., Sacks, R., and Brilakis, I., (2016). ‘Semantic Enrichment for Building Information Modeling,’ Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 261-274. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mice.12128/abstract

    The Technion SeeBIM semantic enrichment engine is currently being enhanced (try it at http://vclab.technion.ac.il/seebridge/) and being applied in the EU Infravation Seebridge research project: http://seebridge.net.technion.ac.il

Comments are closed.