Project ALICE

There are typical challenges that face the Electrical/Mechanical design teams during the setup and development of BIM models. These challenges include but are not limited to:

1. Considerable budget allocated for BIM model design and coordination. This activity involves frequent and time-consuming tasks such as setting up the Revit model, creating views and sheets, applying view templates and setting up linked model views, tagging and dimensioning layouts, wiring and addressing elements, setting up schedules, and exporting the bill of material, etc.
2. Applying a proper and systematic quality control process to all BIM models to ensure following the correct design standard and to eliminate/mitigate common mistakes BIM designers make.
3. Achieving consistency in project design deliverables by following one standard that applies to all BIM models so that the deliverables are the same regardless of the designer who developed the drawings.
4. A considerable challenge is fully utilizing the BIM capabilities by extracting custom reports from the Revit Database required by various disciplines, such as quantity take-off lists by zones, rooms or levels. And the ability to do bulk changes to element parameters based on external datasets i.e. excel spreadsheets.

These challenges raised the need to develop tools that enable BIM designers to automate their BIM tasks and fully utilize BIM capabilities.

A set of surveys and brainstorming sessions were held to determine the BIM design tasks that are:

• Completed frequently by the design team in projects.
• Consume significant working hours.
• Could be automated.
  

These tasks were then shortlisted and categorized into five sets of tools:

1. Project Setup tools: These are the tools that help the team leaders to setup a new Revit model. For example, tools were developed to set project worksets, create views and sheets based on excel list, load standard Revit Families, etc.
2. Design Tools: Developed to help designers accomplish the day-to-day design tasks. These tools range from simple tools that open multiple sheets and views, to more advanced tools that manage element parameters and place elements in the model based on specific criteria.
3. Formatting Tools: Tools used to achieve consistency in the appearance of the design deliverables through applying the same formatting rules. Such as tools that override tag colors based on host elements, tools for saving layouts with a standard naming convention, etc.
4. Counting Tools: To maximize the utilization of BIM capabilities by extracting custom information from the Revit Database according to defined criteria. For example, one of the tools removes all elements from a defined background located in each zone and exports them to an excel sheet.
5. Quality Control Tools: Designed to apply a systematic method for QC checking of Revit models.